Research Paper- The death penalty is a detterent to crime Essay

Research Paper- The death penalty is a detterent to crime - Essay Example "I say that the man of honor would choose death, and the knave would choose servitude" (Kant, 1996). In modern times this controversial debate has been taken up again and again due to the occurrence of one event or the other, this includes times whereby a murderer was not sentenced to death and later on, upon release from prison, killed again, or when a man who was sentenced to death was proven to be innocent later on. It sprang up once again when the Governor of New York George Elmer Pataki signed a law that reinstated the death penalty in the state of New York in 1995, and also later when the Court of Appeals struck it down in 2004. The latter also started a debate about ending the death penalty altogether throughout the U.S. Those who oppose the death penalty claim that not only is it inhumane and barbaric, but it also has no deterrence value whatsoever, as those who are bent on killing will do so irrespective. Further, it is also stated that it is also probable that the mentally disabled and/or the innocent also fall victim to the death penalty. These statements might hold some truth, however, in the grander scheme of things it is to be noted that though we find out about cases whereby the killer ignored the death penalty threat and still chose to kill, however, we do not find any statistics regarding those who might have killed had there been no capital punishment laws. It is next to impossible to find out just how many people have refrained from murder due to such laws. Moreover, there are people who are reckless enough to do anything despite there being laws prohibiting those acts, and to take them as an example for the whole society and then frame laws would be a grave mistake on the part of the authorities. It is almost always the majority of the people for whom the laws are set up and it is their psychology and their minds that have to