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Capital Punishment: The Good Side in the Evil
Imagine your family murdered horribly by a serial killer, who eventually gets arrested, but the judge sentences him to only 12 years. How would you feel? Would you feel satisfied with the punishment given to the murderer? Or would you feel vengeful at the significantly weak punishment that was given to the criminal? This is where capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, comes into play. It gives closure and emotional relief to the victims’ families, saves the lives of innocent citizens, and is, in truth, crucial for maintaining society and national security. Whatever people’s perspectives are toward the death penalty, one thing most people will never know is the pain experienced by the families when their loved ones are brutally abused and murdered. However, when the death penalty is given to criminals, it gives some form of closure to the victim’s family members and can lessen that pain.
On October 11, 1993, 18-year-old Julie Heath (June 11, 1975 – October 11, 1993) was driving on U.S. Highway 270 between Malvern and Hot Springs, Arkansas, to visit her boyfriend in Hot Springs when she was raped and murdered by 45-years old sex offender, Eric Nance. He was sentenced to death by a federal judge of the Eastern District of Arkansas. Given a lethal injection, he was pronounced dead at 9:24 p.m. in 2005. Although the family members had to go through extreme pain and suffering, the death of the criminal gave them some sort of closure as Belinda Crites, one of the cousins of the victim said, ‘It brings closure that he is gone, but it will never bring back Julie – what he’s done to our family, I hope that he did say he’s sorry to someone for what he had done…We want to make sure the devil dies. He’s gone now so I hope they can rest in peace.’ As a human being, when a person takes another person’s life away, it is logically fair that he or she would be put in a correctional facility and have their life taken from them similarly as they ended the life of another. Hence, it is evident that the death penalty attains the goal of providing closure in some form of way to the victims and their families emotionally. Putting certain people to death for committing murder subsequently makes other potential killers reconsider murdering someone, saving the innocent lives of citizens.
According to a dozen studies, for each inmate put to death, 3 to 18 murders are prevented. Economists in the past decade compared the number of executions in various jurisdictions with homicide rates over time and stated that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. “I am opposed to the death penalty, but my research shows that there is a deterrent effect,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University who was the first to discover that for every execution, five people live. The reason why murder rates tend to fall as executions rise is inconclusive. However, Ernest van den Haag, a Professor of Jurisprudence at Fordham University stated that whenever an inmate is executed, other prisoners serving a life sentence tend to reconsider killing a guard or committing other capital crimes he continued, “Whatever people fear most is likely to deter most,” which is death. Although some economists approached the studies with sharp criticism, stating that the logical theories of economists do not apply to the world of capital punishments, Mr. Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 said the studies have convinced him that the death penalty does deter crime as he said, “the evidence of a variety of types, not simply the quantitative evidence – has been enough to convince me that capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of offenses.” Moreover, Professor Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, law professors at Harvard, stated in their Stanford Law Review article, Deterring Murder: A Reply, “… the recent evidence of a deterrent effect from capital punishment seems impressive, especially in light of its ‘apparent power and unanimity,’ ” One of the strongest studies states that capital punishment does deter the crime rate as a 2003 paper by Lawrence Katz, Steven D. Levitt and Ellen Shustorovich published in The American Law and Economics Review discovered “a strong and robust negative relationship” between the prison conditions, as measured by the number of deaths in prison from any cause, and the crime rate. The authors stated that 30 to 100 violent crimes and a similar number of crimes were deterred per prison death.
Consequently, it is evident, based on the studies and reviews, that capital punishment does deter and in return saves the lives of innocent people. The death penalty is frequently protected from its condemnation because society has an ethical commitment to the security of the well-being and welfare of its people. According to the composition, “A just society requires the death penalty for the taking of a life: Agree”, “When someone takes a life, the balance of justice is disturbed. Unless that balance is restored, society succumbs to a rule of violence,” which eventually disrupts the stability and security of the nations. Whenever a criminal is sentenced to death, it inevitably means that he or she has carried out espionage, treason, murder, mass murder, and other horrific capital crimes. These types of criminals threaten the safety and welfare of the nation, and thus, putting them to death ensures that they will create no more victims.
According to the NYC Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in a New York Post article, “Record number of killers and rapists being released from upstate prisons, many returning to NYC”, between 1985 and 2005, when 568,397 state-incarcerated offenders were released, 4.2 percent of them committed new violent felonies. Those included 1,471 murders, attempted murders or manslaughter convictions, and 1,013 rapes or other sex crimes. “This is an issue that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College and a former cop. “You certainly want to give people a second chance, but almost inevitably someone in that group is going to become a repeat offender.” For instance, according to the NYC Department of Correction, a convicted rapist-killer who strangled a teen in 1981 and was suspected of cutting out the eyes of an earlier victim has been arrested on a new rape charge, six years after he got out of jail. He was sentenced to 25 years to life for abducting, raping, and killing 19-year-old Doreen Vitale on Oct. 15, 1981, before he was released on Aug. 20, 2013, after more than 30 years in jail. Hence, it seems equitable to take an ‘eye for an eye’ and a life for a life. Robert Blecker, JD, Professor of Law at New York Law School, during an interview, ‘Q&A: Death Penalty Proponent Robert Blecker,” said ‘We have the responsibility to punish those who deserve it, but only to the degree they deserve it…We should only execute those who most deserve it. And not randomly. Refine our death penalty statutes and review the sentences of everyone on death row. Release into the general population those who don’t deserve to die. The rest we should execute, worst first.’ Furthermore, James Thayer, who wrote in a piece called “In Defense of the Death Penalty,” stated, “So from a utilitarian stance, it is more moral to utilize the death penalty, and take the chance of executing roughly 120 innocent people every 30 years, than to not employ it and take the chance of murdering roughly 30,000 people in the same period,” which argued that the value in executing murderers outweighs the potential harm of innocent people facing death penalty. For the past decades, highly heinous, minacious criminals have evaded capital punishment and have been released back to society, which is significantly perilous and menacing to the public.
One iconic, famous criminal in history is Pablo Escobar, a Colombian drug lord and the leader of one of the most powerful criminal organizations ever assembled. According to an article, Biography of Pablo Escobar, Colombian Drug Kingpin by Christopher Minster, Escobar made billions of dollars, ordered the murders of hundreds of people, and ruled over a personal empire of mansions, airplanes, a private zoo, and his army of soldiers and hardened criminals. He ran his organization, the Medellin Cartel, from 1976 to 1993, and at the height of his career, he supplied 80% of the cocaine smuggled into the US, which was eventually worth over $30 billion by the 1990s. Unfortunately, this made Colombia one of the most dangerous places in the world, and the country fell into a civil war between the Narcos and the government. At the height of the conflict in the 1990s, Escobar decided to turn himself in instead of being extradited to the US. He negotiated to stay in Colombia in a prison he designed himself called La Catedral, which became his luxury resort. However, Escobar was still running his operation from La Catedral, but in July 1992, it became known that the drug kingpin had ordered some disloyal underlings brought to his “prison,” where they were tortured and killed. Eventually, the Colombian government decided to transfer him to a standard prison. Fearing he might be extradited, Escobar escaped and went into hiding.
In the end, he died during a shootout between Escobar and Colombian security forces On December 2, 1993. If Pablo had executed earlier in any possible way before he started to kill people in La Catedral, countless lives would have been saved. Another case that threatens the security and welfare of the citizens in society is about a Canadian serial killer couple Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. According to an article, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Case by The Canadian Encyclopedia, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo met each other when Homolka was 17 and Bernardo was 23. After marriage, both soon discovered that they shared sadomasochistic inclinations. Paul quickly took on the role of a leader and Homolka willingly became his partner. Both had raped, drugged, tortured, killing young teen girls, including Homolka’s younger sister, whom she offered to her boyfriend Paul Bernardo as a gift, as they videotaped the sexual assaults. Homolka eventually broke up with Bernardo after months of constant physical abuse. In mid-February, Bernardo was arrested and charged with the rapes and the murders of Mahaffy and French. However, Homolka was only sentenced to 12 years in prison for her participation in gathering evidence and arresting Bernardo. After a period, when Bernardo’s ex-lawyer viewed the videotapes that Homolka and Bernardo had made, Homolka’s true involvement came to light. Regardless of the evidence, she was released from prison in Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec in 2005. From then on, Canadian citizens and the victim’s families have accused her of involvement in the crime with Bernardo. However, she has been managing to keep herself out of jail which disrupts the Canadian citizens’ security and welfare. These cases imply that for the most remorseless and heinous crimes, the criminals deserve the worst punishment under the system of law for the protection and welfare of the nation, and that is capital punishment. It is evident that the death penalty brings closure to the ordeal for a victim’s family, prevents murders in the future, and ensures the safety of the welfare of citizens and national security. 58 countries retain the death penalty whereas 102 countries do not. 102 nations need to approach the death penalty differently and take another look at the positive side of it.
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