In the Bible, it says, “an eye for an eye.” Even if you’re not religious or a practicing Christian, you probably know what that means. It means that if someone does something, there should be equal retribution.
In some respects, the law feels the same way. That is why, in a few states, the death penalty is still on the table if someone commits a horrendous crime. There are arguments you could make both for and against capital punishment, and we’ll have a look at those right now.
First-Degree Murder
For this article, we’ll use the first-degree murder example. In death penalty states, a person who a jury finds guilty of first-degree murder has three possible outcomes. They might:
• Get a minimum 25-year prison sentence
• Get “natural life,” which means life without any parole possibility
• Get the death penalty
There are a few other possible crimes where the prosecutor might seek the death penalty, but for first-degree murder, you’re going away for at least twenty-five years. Most people would agree that seems reasonable.
Keep in mind that first-degree murder is where you plan someone’s death and then act on those plans, killing them. That means we’re talking about premeditation.
You thought about killing someone a certain way and had the chance to stop at any time, but you didn’t. You went through with the plan, indicating you were both cold and calculating.
There are also a couple of other situations the law considers first-degree murder, such as if you commit a felonious act, and while committing it, you kill someone, like a bank security guard. Also, if you’re robbing a bank, and a security guard shoots at you but kills a bystander, they can charge you with first-degree murder for that as well.
The Social Contract
The social contract:
• Means you’re willing to follow certain societal rules
• Is nothing you ever sign or state you’ll follow, and yet society expects that you’ll do so
Most people feel like the social contract is something that always needs to be in place. It’s unwritten rules rather than written ones. It states that you won’t do things like sell crack to school children, hit old ladies with baseball bats, and generally cause misery and mayhem.
If someone supports the death penalty, they often do so because they feel like some people break the social contract so egregiously that they’re irredeemable. Rather than locking them up for the rest of their life and paying for their room and board, these people feel like it’s okay to execute them.
Those Against the Death Penalty
On the aisle’s other side, you have those who feel that no matter how poorly someone behaves, we as a society do not have the right to kill them. These objectors feel like it’s inhumane, regardless of whether the person in question did something horrific.
The reason these two sides clash, and continue to do so, is because there’s no halfway point on this thing. We as a society either execute people, or we don’t.
In America, we’ve decided to make it a state issue rather than a federal one. This makes sense, to some degree. Some states feel differently about specific topics than other ones do.
Because of this, someone who’s liberal might live in New York or California, while someone conservative might live in Texas. Texas, unsurprisingly, is a death-penalty state.
Who’s Right?
It’s probably impossible to convince someone who’s for the death penalty that we should not execute anyone, and you probably won’t have any luck convincing someone who’s against it that the other side has a valid point. It’s kind of like the abortion argument. You’re either for or against, and you’re not inclined to listen to what the other side says.
It’s true that if you lock someone up and throw away the key, you do have to feed them, clothe them, guard them, and handle their medical treatment for the rest of their life. That costs taxpayer money.
Some people do things so terrible that even the most strident anti-death-penalty individual pauses to at least think about it for a moment. It’s hard to say that society should allow someone to live who raped and murdered fifty women, for instance.
It’s an extremely difficult subject and one about which each of us probably feels a little differently. There are seemingly always going to be people for and against it, as is true with all of society’s most contentious issues.
