By Jacques Benoit

1. The Death Penalty: Why it should be Illegal By Jacques Benoit

2. Death Penalty Defined • Death penalty or death sentence, which in some cases is also known as capital punishment is an integral part of the study of political and legal sciences. Scholars, right from the times of ancient Greece till the founding fathers of the United States have made several remarks and interpretations of the death penalties and their disadvantages.

3. Why there shouldn’t be a Death Penalty • There is a long list of cons as modern society has come to conclusion that a death penalty is not a final solution to brutal crime. The laws have become less stringent in the past 50 years, due to the following cons of death penalty.

4. An Eye for an Eye? • One wide-spread notion of masses is that it is not fair and is unethical to execute a prisoner as he/she is also a human being. A death penalty is not a good solution. This notion is supported by a popular statement, 'why kill a criminal because he has killed somebody, what is the difference between us and them?'. Thus the eye for an eye temperament is slowly becoming unpopular in many communities. • An Eye for Eye is also not a excepted practice in today’s legal system. If a man seeks revenge on another that may have wronged him, The man seeking the revenge is wrong. So what gives the government the right to do the same thing?

5. It does not dissuade any further Crime • If the foreknowledge of any punishment is meant to dissuade the criminal from committing the crime, why do people still murder others?  The US had a 2012 murder rate of 4.8 victims per 100,000—meaning that nearly 15,000 people were victims of homicide that year.  Capital punishment does not appear to be doing its job; it doesn’t seem to be changing every criminal’s mind about killing innocent people.  If it does not dissuade, then it serves no purpose.  The warning of life in prison without parole must equally dissuade criminals.

6. Life in Prison is worse • Spending your remaining days a place that is hard and very often brutally taxing on the mind would be a much more severe punishment than death. Death is ultimate after the person has dies, there is no more suffering.

7. The Costs • The cost to have the death penalty is higher than it would to not. While the injection materials itself is not expensive, the process before the sentence is carried out is. • Death Row inmates are granted an unlimited appeals process, which means that they can fight their sentence in court until the day of the execution.

8. Cruel and Unusual • Capital punishment could fall under the guideline of cruel and unusual punishment. Although it was widely used early in the 19th century as a norm for punishment. By today’s standards it should be considered cruel.

9. Does it provide Closure? • One of the arguments for the death penalty is that it provides closure for the Victims. • Closure unfortunately is a mental state and has no place in the American Justice system. If we were to base all laws on how somebody felt, we would live in a very feudal society.

10. Conclusion • The Death Penalty is an outdated practice that has absolutely no place in our current society. Our laws are not based on an “eye for an eye” or the feelings of an individual. • It is to costly and it is cruel, what type of precedent are we setting by killing those who have killed, and if the government can do it why cant some average citizen who has had some wrong done onto him or her.