AFFIRMING LIFE; A TRICKY BUSINESS
I started thinking about the acceptability of the death penalty when I was about fifteen years old, now, some eight years later I do not believe I have made much headway. The arguments both for and against both take different sets of values as granted and therefore make the possibility of a joint solution a very remote one. Not very long ago, I read two articles on capital punishment that awoke the slumbering argument in my head; one of these articles argues in favor of the death penalty, the other is a response to the first.
Edward Koch, the writer of the article supporting the death penalty, presents his reader with a numbered list of arguments against capital punishment; arguments which he then tries to unnerve. Early on in his essay he compares the death penalty with the methods and therapies involved in the curing of cancer. People need not like them, but they are necessary to eradicate the illness, he suggests. Since over the last two decades, the means of fighting and detecting cancer have become increasingly effective and less destructive on the human body, this analogy implicates that the usage of capital punishment has had positive and discernible effects, the entire essay, however, remains silent on any such effects.
Further on, Koch forwards the claim that the death penalty in the U.S.A. is justified by its extremely high murder rate, but fails to mention that perhaps it would be more logical to lower this murder rate not by removing the murderers from society permanently but by preventing them from becoming murderers at all. Koch goes on to mention exact numbers of convicted murderers that were arrested on murder charges for a second time in 1976 and 1977 he does not, however, mention how these numbers stand relative to the total amount of people who were arrested because they were suspected of murder, this renders the argument empty on account of a lack of information required to construct the larger picture.
Finally, Koch implies that a judiciary system that does not incorporate capital punishment is defective; his views on the death penalty appear to be so extreme as to dismiss any sentence that falls short of it as insufficient without first exploring it. Then, at the end of the article, Koch expands this idea by suggesting that opponents of capital punishment are not willing to get involved with justice. Thus trying to incriminate his rivals by putting words in their mouths.
The responding article by David Bruck has makes use of a distinct advantage that Koch did not have readily available: it is a response to one article and can therefore expect to give a bit more credibility to its own arguments by attacking the examples used in the other article. Bruck starts out by discrediting his rival when he proposes that the article that he is responding to hinges on a standardized argumentation which is lacking in moral values, by this time he has not evaluated one of Koch’s arguments nor has he offered any strong points of his own, like Koch, he is manipulating his audience by doing their thinking for them. After this, Bruck examines a number of cases he believes illustrate the redundancy of the death sentence. Naming the blood–thirsty crowds that sometimes form outside prisons when an execution is performed, furthermore, he mentions the mental torture that an impending execution carries with it which drives certain convicts mad. These examples were all ignored by the other article and manage to carry much convincing power simply because of their absence in the other article; it suggests that Hock is a theoretical man who has not carefully looked at the real world.
Both Hock and Bruck cite an investigation on the execution of innocent people, both are incomplete in the way they handle this information. Bruck accuses Hock of neglecting to add that many executions never take place because new evidence clears the convicts. Bruck, however, does not enter into specifics when he admits that only a small number of errors were made with executions that actually took place. This is not the only place where Bruck is rather lenient with figures; later on, he mentions the fact that, in spite of numerous executions, the rate of intentional homicide in Florida actually rose while a decline was registered in the rest of the country. Bruck never proves that the conclusion he draws there is a legitimate one; many different factors influence these figures and the possibility of a death sentence may or may not be a limiting factor, Bruck provides no evidence either way, thereby putting his own reasoning up for questioning.
I personally have still not decided on what my point of view on the death penalty is, after carefully reading both articles I have seen that both parties make mistakes in providing information and tend to ignore data that does not support their case. Both authors have written short articles that deal with a subject that is both controversial and multifaceted. Considering the limited amount of space they used to present their argument, a number of deficiencies are to be expected, in addition, given that the issue is largely dependant on moral values, their merging of argument with emotional appeal can also be understood. Furthermore, both authors had access to just one voice, their own, in writing the article; making it hard for them to present both sides of the issue in a fair manner. What both authors have produced is not a final, nor a comprehensive view of their case; what they have produced, however, are additions to the ongoing debate. These additions are paramount to maintain a certain amount of understanding and respect between the various parties involved.
16 Oct. 01
