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Capital Punishment

Should the state reinstate the death penalty?

Argumentative Essay by: Marlina Fockler


“We the jury find you guilty of first-degree murder.” Now imagine how you would feel

when you hear these words going through your head. The argument for this paper is should the

punishment fit the crime. I believe that the death penalty should be reinstated in the state of

West Virginia because is has a lower cost per capita than a life sentence behind bars and it is the

only adequate punishment for certain crimes. I also feel that if executions were made public it

would serve as an excellent deterrent.

According to Wendy Lesser, Founding Editor of The Threepenny Review, in her 1993

book titled Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder: “The most

persuasive reason I can think of not to televise executions, like the most persuasive reason not to

have executions, has to do with the effect on us…….I’m thinking of what it would mean about

us, the audience, if we allowed someone’s actual murder to become our Theater of Cruelty. The

danger of a TV execution is that we would not take it personally…it is possible that instead of

making the killing more real to us, the sight of a condemned person dying on TV might only

acclimate us further to such violent images.”

The arguments for the death penalty are just as numerous as the the arguments against.

According to polls by the Gallup organization (which has studied this topic over 50 years)

findings the American public is in approval of approximately 66% of the death penalty, but this

number flucuates through time as with public opinion. State polls in the state have shown that

approximately 73% of the population favored the return of the death penalty while 18% were

opposed, and finally 9% who had no opinion. (Delegate John Overington, R-Berkeley, WV

House of Representatives)
The argument that it is cheaper to place a prisoner behind bars for the rest of their lives is

cheaper than executing them is the next part. After researching the costs of keeping a prisoner it

costs approximately $87 a day to feed and house said offender. If you look at it this way, you

need to look at the fact that these prisoners are not going to be in there for just a few days or

months, they are in there for years or decades. It adds up and quickly. Taxpayers are the ones

paying for this, the victim’s families are paying for their upkeep. I find this to be an outrage.

They are not contributing members of society!

If you look at the statistics the prisoners are overcrowded. I am telling you that there is a

simpler way to deal with the situation. If you are accused of a heinous crime, you will be

punished for it. The ancient code of Hammurabi which dates back to the year 1790 BC states

what the punishment is to be for certain crimes and they were even tough than the laws we have

today. The Bible even tells the punishment that someone who has been found guilty of a crime

what their punishment is to be. Under the Mosaic Law, there are specific punishments were to

be dealt to the perpetrators of the crimes. If we look at these examples we should see where our

founding fathers were getting their information when they wrote the Constitution which to this

day we use when laws are written. We use these rights when we take a muderer, rapist, or other

criminals who have been charged with a crime. Oppenents argue the fact that an execution is a

cruel and unusual punishment to take their life away. What about the fact that they have taken a

life more violently than we are planning to do to them. A murder is a violent taking of life, but

what about rape? Rape may not be a physical death but it kills the psyche or spirit of the person.

Should that not be punished with the same as a muderer?

West Virginia was a death penalty state until 1965, but lets look at what happened prior

to this and did it make a difference in the statistics. We had the death penalty under the law of

Virginia before we became a state and continued to have a low number of executions and since
we became a state we have yet to execute a woman. Odd when you look at other states…they

have plenty of women that are on death row. We had no prisoners on the list for federal

execution list until 2007 and then there were only 2.

The last public execution happened in the state of West Virginia in 1897. John F.

Morgan was found guilty of murdering 3 people in cold blood. He was given the right to a

speedy trial that within three days he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to die. This proves my

point that public executions should be used as a deterrent to crime and we will see lower crime

numbers when you take the prisoners who have been found guilty without a reasonable doubt

and do away with the problem.

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