Capital Punishment Essay: Death Penalty Can be Fair, and Fun!

The Death Penalty Can be pleasure ground Every American should want fairness in all aras of open policy - this is specially true with regard to the death penalty, since the stakes are high. But the opponents of the death penalty make a most suspect argument about fairness. They argue that if the death penalty is not administered fairly, and especially administered with racial fairness, it must be abolished. Nobody would even think of exhausting to apply this principle in a consistent way. If we bring out that menacing neighborhoods get less police protection than white neighborhoods, would we withdraw cops from both black and white neighborhoods? If banks are discriminating against black home buyers in mortgage l terminusing, would we demand they stop all mortgage lending? If we find the IRS discriminating against middle-class and poor taxpayers, would we want to abolish the IRS? All right, that does grant an attraction, but nobody is seriously suggesting it. What do th e opponents of the death penalty assign should replace it? Life imprisonment, perhaps? But there is no modestness to believe this penalty is more fairly imposed than the death penalty. So are we going to knock the maximum down to 10 age? If so, we face the same problem. In addition to the philosophical incoherence of the argument, the verifiable reality of racial disparity in capital punishment is a lot more complicated than simplistic notions about racism chair riot in the criminal justice system would lead you to believe. Its primal here to understand that the opponents of the death penalty make two assorted arguments about racial fairness, and they are flatly contradictory. The first thing that we go over when we start looking at statistics is... ...pital defendants are a highly self-selected and just unbiased group. So what we have, in the way of hard statistical evidence, fails to validate the politically correct fantasy of massive discrimination. Is the death p enalty administered with ameliorate fairness? No. Is it administered as fairly as other humans policies, and especially as fairly as other criminal sanctions? Yes. existence officials should work to make the system even fairer. In particular, better supplying could be made for an effective defense in capital cases. And I think that a revival of executive clemency (which has fallen into disuse) in cases where a jury is perceived to have been too harsh would be a good thing. But the notion that unfairness, and particularly racial unfairness, requires the end of the death penalty makes neither philosophical nor empirical sense.