Today, in modern law, the death penalty is corporal punishment. It is irreversible. It ends the lives of those punished, instead of temporarily imprisoning them. Although capital punishment is not intended to inflict physical pain, execution is the only corporal punishment still applied to adults. The usual alternative to the death penalty is life-long imprisonment. The media commonly report that the American public overwhelmingly supports the death penalty. More careful analysis of public attitudes, however, reveals that most Americans would oppose the death penalty if convicted murderers were sentenced to life without parole and were required to make some form of financial restitution. "In California, for example, a Field Institute survey showed that in 1990,82 percent approved in principle of the death penalty. But when asked to choose between the death penalty and life imprisonment plus restitution, only a small minority, 26 percent, continued to favor executions.
The......
Join Now or Login to view the rest of this paper.
Approximate Word Count: 2313
Approximate Pages: 9 (260 words per double-spaced page) |