Death Penalty and the American Criminal Justice Research Paper

Death Penalty and the American Criminal Justice - Research Paper Example It is aligned with the retributive justice system where there is a focus on the crime, the criminal and punishment and justice is meted within the "eye for an eye" context. Capital punishment has been sanctioned mainly because it is supposed to serve three purposes: deterrence to crime, retribution for the victim and repentance on the part of the criminal. According to Banner, these promised benefits have not been met (23). Particularly, the death penalty failed to drive a decrease in heinous crimes. In addition, claiming the life of an offender for retribution and repentance is morally inconsistent. There is the ethical challenge of weighing the lives of the innocent against that of the guilty. This is further aggravated by the position that the government is partially to blame for failing to prevent serious crimes. There is the position that individual offenders are not the sole responsible for criminality so there is the question of whether they should be made to bear the brunt of such extreme punishment. These variables tend to violate the morality and ethics of using death penalty in order to serve their stated purposes. The American Law Institute, the very organization that created the death penalty through the Model Penal Code of 1963, withdrew its approval of the capital punishment. The organization argued that death penalty is not aligned with the core legal values of the United States that is why it should never have been sanctioned in the first place (Hood & Deva, 182). This was highlighted by Zimring and Simon when they pointed out that there is always a risk of error in administering the death penalty and the consequences of this event far outweigh the potential benefits in terms of harm done and the justice being called for in the resolution of crimes (158). The US Supreme Court is also known to support its abolition. Early decisions have established the judicial view that capital punishment is  unconstitutional and it violates the Eighth Amendm ent of the US Constitution.