The death penalty is a mechanism that gives the state or the people in power the ability to terminate someone’s life based on an action that goes beyond the boundaries of the law, or in certain cases, an accusation of such. To determine the normative question of its availability as a tool of punishment, we cannot analyze the economics of the circumstances. Rather, we must determine the morality of the action to decide whether or not it is a legitimate form of punishment.
Every human being is born with the inalienable right to life. This is often stated as a given by opponents of the death penalty, but I will delve further into this argument. The creation of human life is a process which only nature is involved in. The state has no role in the process of creation, and therefore should have no role in ceasing life. Similarly, the biological parents of a given child do not have a role in the ceasing of life, because creating life is a natural process and the creators of the child are arbitrary, as any two individuals of the opposite sex could have caused the child to be born. Procreation is a necessary aspect of the existence of any species, as declared by nature, and the actors involved can vary without any noticeable difference.
When a child is born, he/she enters into a contract with the state, assuming that is the current form of political organization, and receives all of the rights that the state gives to its other citizens. In an ideal world, the child maintains all of these rights until he/she becomes of age and is given an opt-out option. When a law of the state is broken, the state receives the ability to relieve the law-breaker of any rights previously afforded to him/her. However, since the right to life is not part of the contract between the individual and the state, the state cannot take this right away. Even in the aftermath of a committed crime, the right to life that is implicit in being born cannot be taken away.
Delving further, there is a question of sentencing that we must deal with. Even if the aforementioned arguments do not hold up, we do not have effective metrics to hand out the death penalty. One way of sentencing is to automatically sentence individuals to death upon completion of a given crime. Murder, for example. Any individual who commits murder would theoretically be put to death under this model. Due to the varying elements in each crime, and the law, this is an unfair `method of sentencing. The second option we have is to assign a judge(s) or a jury to determine the sentencing.
A human being cannot evaluate the punishment of another human being for several reasons. First, an individual is too malleable, and therefore open to external influence. If the normative idea of revenge is commonplace in society, as it often is, then there is an increased likelihood of capital punishment approval. Because many people cite revenge as an essential aspect of the criminal justice system, and revenge and death is a common conflation, it is impossible for a fair and unbiased evaluation of an individual accused of a crime, even if such a fair metric existed.
Secondly, allowing a third party to assess the punishment for a crime, with the cessation of life as an option, is inconsistent with the logic of law. If the death penalty could be an option, then the victim must be the one to decide the offender’s fate, because revenge is inevitably going to be considered, being implicit in the death penalty. But it must be the revenge of the victim, not a third party.
Since the death penalty is largely sought after in murder trials, the former is often impossible.
