Capital Punishment and its Consequences on American Government

The eighth amendment of the US constitution prohibits the infliction of cruel and unusual punishments for crimes. Even though this vague prohibition is written in the constitution itself, every justice has decided that this does not include the death penalty. For moral, practical, and monetary reasons, the death penalty should be completely abolished in America.

For the record, there have been moments in US history where the death penalty has been temporarily put out of use. In the Furman v. Georgia case, the supreme court decided that states were being too flexible with their capital punishment decisions. The court didn’t ban the penalty itself, since the case dealt with the fact that only the inconsistent application of execution as punishment was cruel and unusual. This stopped all executions for a while since most of the states did not have clearly defined guidelines for applying the death sentence. States quickly caught up and updated their laws to accommodate the supreme court’s decision. The number of prisoners in death row rose back to those before Furman.

Another instance where the death penalty was paid some attention was in the 1988 presidential election where democratic contender Michael Dukakis was asked about his position on it. The moderator asked whether he would favor the execution of his hypothetical wife’s rapist and murderer. Dukakis, being an opponent of the penalty, denied that he would, insisting that there are more effective alternatives to dealing with criminals. This is believed by many, including Dukakis himself, to be the point where he started to lose against Bush.

These interesting bits of history serve to educate us about the sad reality of what people really feel in America. Americans know that there is not a decrease in crime because of death as a consequence. We are also starting to be aware of the many lives that have been saved from the injection by emerging technology like DNA matching and its implications on previous cases where innocent people have been executed. What it really tells us is that we either do not know what progress is, or that we do not want it. We are driven by emotions rather than our logic. We prefer to spend $90,000 more per death row prisoner per year than we would for a regular prisoner. We prefer to end the life of murderers instead of studying them and trying to find a more effective cure. We prefer our president to seek revenge, to be unforgiving, and to not settle for anything else than getting even.