Question.1171 - The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the death penalty does not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on "cruel and unusual" punishment. The Court, however, has limited the classes of people and crimes that are death-penalty eligible. The following prompt gives you an opportunity to weigh the pros/cons of the death penalty. Do empirical studies provide support for the idea that the death penalty deters crime? Do other punishment theories, such as retribution, provide compelling reason for states to continue to impose the death penalty? Using concrete examples and references to course materials, please explain your position.
Answer Below:
The Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty does not violate the ban on unusual and cruel punishment of the Eighth Amendment. However, the Eighth Amendment shapes the procedural aspects when the jury death penalty is carried out and used. There are different results on the death penalty in the empirical studies. Some studies claim that the fear involved in committing such heinous crimes and the consequences attached to it related to it, such as execution as a capital punishment, can deter criminals from commiting criminal activities. On the other side, the effectiveness of the death penalty is still in doubt. The fundamental difficulty in sentencing the death penalty is that it is applied rarely in the criminal cases of homicides it has plausibly deterred the homicides that have caused the changes in the rate caused by other factors of homicide (Donohue & Wolfers, 2006). Retribution justifies whether the death penalty should deter or not deter offenses. However, capital punishment is said to have a positive deterrent effect on serious and violent criminal offenses. There are different arguments applied in the retribution theory; denunciation is the theory that requires an analysis of the effect of capital punishment to ensure that the criminals are satisfied. Moreover, It can interpreted from the arguments of retribution that some prohibit it due to ethical grounds. References Donohue, J. J., & Wolfers, J. (2006). Uses and abuses of empirical evidence in the death penalty debate.More Articles From CRIMINAL LAW MANAGEMENT
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