The Death Penalty Should Be Abolished

I. The Right to LifeBefore it can be concluded that humans have the right to life, it must be asserted that rights exist at all. One simple argument in favor of the existence of rights is national and international law itself. Certain laws codify what rights citizens and humans have, and thus can be treated as rights, applicable to everyone. These rights may seem artificial in comparison to rights that arise either from divine decree or human innateness, but they are rights nevertheless. [1]On the national level, Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, one of the three founding documents that American government is based on (the other two being the Constitution and the Bill of Rights), wrote that, “…that they [men] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ” On the international level, the United Declaration of Human Rights, written up by the United Nationals General Assembly, says, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. ” Thus, we see that the right to life is already an integral part of both US and international law. [2][3]A more sophisticated argument involves agency-based justification. “He [Alan Gewirth] argued that denying the value of successful agency and action is not an option for a human being; having a life requires regarding the indispensable conditions of agency and action as necessary goods. Abstractly described, these conditions of successful agency are freedom and well-being. A prudent rational agent who must have freedom and well-being will assert a ‘prudential right claim’ to them. Having demanded that others must respect her freedom and well-being, consistency requires her to recognize and respect the freedom and well-being of other persons. Since all other agents are in exactly the same position as she is of desperately needing freedom and well-being, consistency requires her to recognize and respect their freedom and well-being. She ‘logically must accept’ that other people as agents have equal rights to freedom and well-being. These two abstract rights work alone and together to generate equal specific human rights of familiar sorts. ”[1]If we have any rights at all, by the agency-based justification argument quoted above, we should have the right to life. Freedom and well-being can only be had when an agent is alive, thus making life a “prudential life claim” to such agent. Because of consistency, that agent must extend the same right to life to everyone else, and by the equality of agent desires, every other agent must feel the same way. Therefore, the right to life is fundamentally protected according to the agency-based justification argument. Therefore, the right to life exists because of both national and international law, and because of agency-based justification. The death penalty necessarily violates such life, as it involves the deliberate ending of a life. Therefore, the death penalty should be viewed as an act which violates the fundamental rights of a human being, and thusly should not be enacted anywhere in the world. II. Psychological EffectsExecuting a criminal is incredibly traumatic to the family. Even if that criminal committed horrible crimes, the family still, understandably, has a strong emotional attachment to the criminal, and seeing that bond snuffed out by the government is a horrible feeling. Source four chronicles some of the psychological problems that family members of executed criminals experience, including PTSD, depression, anxiety disorder, and many other psychological conditions. Children in particular are hugely affected. Another study (source five), found that, in addition to the myriad of psychological problems children can experience, they can also experience social stigmatization, which leads to other psychological problems like loneliness. [4][5]Executioners can also experience psychological issues. Executing a criminal who has committed a lot of violent crimes is often seen as a morally righteous act. Consequently, the people who perform the executions are commonly viewed to be the ones bringing about such a morally righteous act, and thus executioners should regard themselves highly. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Executioners often experience depression and paranoia from the actions they commit. One executioner, Jerry Givens, who executed 62 people, said, “I performed the execution. So you might suffer a little. I'm going to suffer a lot, because I performed the job. ”[6][7]Finally, the criminals on death row themselves often have psychological issues because of the fact that they’re on death row. There’s even a name for it, death row syndrome. It arises because of the isolation death row inmates often face (most are placed in solitary confinement for at least 23 hours a day) and the fact that they view their fate as uncertain, as the appeals process is extremely complicated and often takes decades to be resolved. Death row is often seen as as psychologically damaging as torture. Particularly given that, as I’m going to argue in my next point, that a lot of death row inmates are actually innocent, it is easy to see that this process is practically inhumane. [8]The death penalty cannot be so beneficial as to outweigh the huge psychological effects that the criminal, the criminal’s family, and the executioner often face. These effects are completely unnecessary. III. The Potential for Innocents to Be KilledThe death penalty is the ultimate punishment. There is nothing that can be taken away from a person that is more important than the person’s life. It’s, at best, questionable whether or not the retributive justice of taking the life of someone who has taken a life is justified. However, there’s also the potential that an innocent person can be executed. One study found that 4.1% of people on death row are innocent. Given the psychological problems detailed above that people on death row often face, not to mention the waste of that person’s life and the fact that, even if he is eventually released, he will inevitably be stigmatized for the rest of his life, this is unacceptable. But it gets one step worse, as the same study found that at least 0.5% of people who are executed are innocent as well (though the number could be a lot higher). This isn’t just unacceptable, this is absolutely deplorable. [9]Even though, according to Supreme Court cases, executing mentally ill people is ostensibly illegal, it still happens a large number of times. Anywhere between five and ten percent of people on death row suffer from some severe mental illness, and there are numerous stories of people with clear mental illnesses that were deemed competent to stand trial, summarily condemned, and then executed, despite the fact that it was clearly visible to the judge and jury that such people suffered from severe mental illness. This is clearly wrong because such people are not truly guilty, as they are unable to understand the consequences or the moral depravity of their actions. Now, one could argue that exuting the mentally ill should be illegal. However, the Supreme court has already ruled that, if a criminal is deemed to be mentally ill either at the time of their trial or the time of their execution, that they cannot be executed, and yet, these laws are often subverted, as I've just shown. [10]Similar to my above argument, the death penalty cannot be so beneficial as to outweigh the fact that innocent people and people with mental illness are being executed. And similarly, these effects are completely unnecessary. ConclusionI have shown that the death penalty violates the right to life, which exists both because of national and international law and because of the agency-based justification argument, that the death penalty results in needless psychological problems for those on death row, their families, and their executioners, and that many people both on death row and that have been executed are innocent, either because of true innocence or as a consequence of preexisting mental illness. Therefore, the death penalty is wrong, and should thus be abolished. Sources[1]: . http://plato.stanford.edu...[2]: . http://www.archives.gov...[3]: . http://www.un.org...[4]: . http://b.3cdn.net...[5]: . http://www.quno.org...[6]: . http://www.njadp.org...[7]: . http://abcnews.go.com...[8]: . http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...[9]: . http://www.pnas.org...[10]: . https://www.aclu.org...