In The 1971 Supreme Court Case Of Furman V. Georgia, The Constitutiona

In the 1971 Supreme court case of Furman V. Georgia, the constitutionality of the death penalty was challenged. The majority opinion held that although the way it was being applied was unconstitutional the death penalty itself was constitutional. They held it unconstitutional because since it was applied arbitrarily and with apparent racial and economic bias it was cruel and unusual. In Weems v. United states (1910) the Supreme Court held that a punishment could be considered cruel and unusual if it is excessive. In Dulles v. Trop the court held that "the basic concept underlying the 8th amendment is nothing less than the dignity of man." According to the court if a punishment denies someone human dignity than it is cruel and unusual. Combined these two cases set the precedent that both (1)breaks the past notion that the only things considered cruel and unusual are the specific things barred at the time the Constitution was penned and (2) says that what is excessive and what attacks human dignity evolves with society. Our society has evolved to the point where we will apply sanctions to other countries to try and prevent them from harming their own citizens. We no longer clamor for public bloodshed, it is something we don't want to see, our society has grown past the death-penalty. It is my feeling that capital punishment is always wrong. The Justice I am in most agreement with is Justice Brennan. His reasoning is that, it is an affront to basic human dignity and he sets up four rules to help determine this. First a punishment may not be so severe as to degrade the dignity of human beings, second it cannot be arbitrary, no conflict with contemporary moral decency and lastly it must be the least severe punishment that achieves the intended goal. We both agree capital punishment breaks all four rules and is therefore against constitutional law. I feel (as stated above) that capital punishment detracts from the dignity of not just the one human that society feels compelled to put to death, but it demeans all of society. I am pretty much a pacifist, I feel that all murder except in the self-defense of another human is wrong. Therefore I feel that people who commit murder should be punished harshly but that does not mean I feel they should be killed. When society decides to take the life of a convicted murderer it is stopping down to the level of the murderer; essentially degrading us all. It is responding to one wrong, with another wrong (two wrongs do not make a right). Killing the murderer serves no purpose, it has not been shown to deter other murders, it does not bring back the person killed, it does not protect society in ways that long-term imprisonment could not, and on top of that it costs more. The only purpose that the death-penalty serves is that of revenge or retribution. Some will make a distinction between the two, noting that retribution is a legal act performed by the government. The government has no power that is not granted to it by the people so essentially, a government act, is an act of the people; capital punishment is the government taking revenge on behalf of the people. Many proponents of capital punishment say that death is the only punishment that people convicted of murder deserve, anything less would not be harsh enough. This causes several problems. One is that many people consider death the easy way out, for example, some say suicide is for wimps. It is actually much harsher punishment on a murderer to confine him to a cell for the rest of his/her life; killing him is a very short-lived punishment. Also in other respects the death penalty may be too severe, although the person is not "punished" per se by long term sanctions on them, they are denied the basic human dignity of existing. It has been said that if someone commits murder they lose their basic human rights and therefore it is not inhumane to kill them. "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life....". That is a direct quote from the Declaration of Independence written by our forefathers in 1776. According to them no matter what certain rights like the right to life are unalienable or