Death Penalty Arguments For

1. "Government punishes killing, so therefore it should not support death penalty."

FALLACY
This argument confuses the killing of INNOCENT civilians with the punishment of GUILTY criminals.

To better understand this fallacy, take into consideration similar punitive measure which are largely accepted within society as normative.

The government punishes stealing, but it also condones FINES. Fines are in effect "stealing," but why is seen as acceptable. The exclusion here
exists because the forcible taking of wealth is imposed on the GUILTY. When forcible taking of wealth is towards the INNOCENT then it is stealing.
Would you say that fines are unethical and unequivocally wrong? Probably not.

Most of you probably believe that holding people in prison is a reasonable measure of punishment. Imprisonment by government of the GUILTY
is considered normative, but holding people against there will, such as unwarranted police detainment or KIDNAPPING is considered a criminal
offense. The exclusive element here is the distinction between INNOCENCE and GUILT. Those who are GUILTY should be imprisoned while those
who are INNOCENT should not be imprisoned. Would you then go on to say that people should NOT BE IMPRISONED for their crimes because
IMPRISONMENT is UNETHICAL? No.

I think that it can then be easily concluded that the death penalty is not hypocritical, as it is the DUTY of the government to PUNISH the GUILTY,
and PROTECT the INNOCENT. We PROTECT the INNOCENT by PUNISHING the GUILTY.


2. "Not deterrent to Crime" @ Eric

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE - Regression Model
"Ehrlich reexamined U.S murder and execution statistics for the period 1933-1969, together with measures of social factors such as unemployment
and per capita income, and then tried to establish a mathematical model relating the murder rate to all these variables, including execution rates. His
model revealed a slight negative relationship, which he found to be statistically significant, between the murder rate and the execution rate. Ehrlich
concluded that "In light of these observations, one cannot reject the hypothesis that punishment, in general, and execution, in particular, exert a unique
deterrent effect on potential murderers."
- Professor John Lamperti, 2004 (Dartmouth)
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articles/JLpaper.pdf

Eric check your sources again they may be outdated. Although many studies have been done, the argument of whether capital does indeed act as a
deterrent to crime has been rendered MOOT. The problem with earlier studies is that they fail to acknowledge the ROOT CAUSE for capital punishment
and its deterrence. Most of the studies were done in state were capital punishment was IMPLEMENTED B/C of HIGH CRIME RATES. Of course, when states
with inherently high crime rates are compared with state W/O capital punishment but inherently low crime rates, a regression model cannot be shown
because it is similar to comparing apples and oranges.