Asked if he had any last words, Mark Fowler began to recite the Hail Mary as the drugs rushed into his veins, then he was silent (Fuhrman 153). Is this justice or torture? When Mark Fowler was put to death, was he considered to be someone's beloved son, father, brother or a cold-hearted killer sans human rights? Although most will agree that crime continues to rise at an alarming rate in the United States, how to prevent the crime is hotly debated. For centuries many methods of execution have been utilized in the United States to reassure a community of its safety. Today, the widespread usage of capital punishment shows no substantial evidence of crime deterrence and sparks raging controversy over moral and ethical issues associated with penalties of such finality.
Four out of five of these books came from the Pima County Public Library, causing some to think there is already an established biased. This is regarded to be false, there is a mixture of many opinions. The book by Robert Wolf however is from the Amphi Jr. High-Prince School Library. Each book has an individual bias different from the next.
In The Story of Cruel and Unusual, author Colin Dayan, a Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, portrays the death penalty as a fair consequence rather than barbarous treatment. “Cruelty takes many forms other than the corporeal, but what is striking about contemporary Eighth Amendment cases, whether dealing with execution or confinement, is the affirmation of the corporal-punishment paradigm, attending only to the body and not to the mind (ignoring, for example, psychological pain and fear) or to the prisoner's place in society-concerns that were once deemed vital to human dignity and worth” (Dayan 43). Dayan believes that any punishment should be judged by the physical pain of a treatment rather than the emotional state of those going through it. Her reasoning for this belief is that a criminal's feelings should not be considered because a feeling does not qualify as a fact in the penal system.
The punitive and dehumanizing practices in prisons at home and abroad stigmatize the detained. Their degradation confirms the sub standards that prisoners are assumed to be. What do prisoners, “security detainees,” and “illegal enemy combatants” in U. S. custody have in common? They are all bodies. Few are granted minds. The unspoken assumption is that prisoners are not persons or at best, they are a different kind of person; so dehumanized that the Eighth Amendment no longer applies. And when our government refuses to recognize that “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment has a precise meaning, when our courts deliberately and knowingly continue to ignore obvious violations of human dignity and worth, such cruel and unusual treatment becomes protected in law. In a penal system it has become instrumental in managing the dispossessed, the unfit, and the dishonored, legalistic phrases such as “minimal civilized measure of life's necessities” and the “basic necessities of human life” prompt us to reconsider the meaning of “human.” (Dayan 90)
Dayan is stating that, after one has taken a life, they have lost their rights and without their born rights they are nothing but a corpse. What is there to do with a walking corpse besides put it to death? Others disagree; violations of human dignity are not needed to satisfy the citizens of the United States.
Mark Fuhrman, detective and journalist, is now in agreement with the abolition of the death penalty as discussed in his exposé, Death and Justice. Fuhrman was firmly for execution because of his past in the law enforcement community. “When I was a cop, I only had compassion for the victims of the crime, I could not allow myself to feel anything but contempt for those who were responsible” (Fuhrman 155). Throughout his investigation of the death penalty in Oklahoma County, a father and cop named Jim Fowler whose son was put to death quickly swayed Fuhrman's opinion. As Fuhrman spoke with Jim he began to realize Jim's anguish and grief, Fuhrman started to see another side to the death penalty; a side in which the victims are those whose only crime was to love another human being (Fuhrman 154). Jim Fowler had done nothing deserving of losing his son and yet there he stood, a victim of the just system called capital punishment. Fuhrman believes that as humans we cannot administer a flawless criminal justice system and therefore there should not be an irrevocable punishment.
And still there are those who feel their job is solely to inform the public. Alan Marzilli presents the death penalty from multiple points of view, offering all statutes, legal opinions, statistics, and studies to help the reader make an educated argument. “It is rare to hear an argument presented in a balanced way, and it is easy to form an opinion on too little information; Capital Punishment will help to fill in the informational gaps that can never be avoided” (Marzilli 6). Without a doubt, Marzilli's book incorporates all of the things he claims it to. “Whatever a person's position on the death penalty, most people argue that our nation must find some way to reduce crime rates, and debates often look at changing how the death penalty is administered” (Marzilli 87). Using an even point of view, Marzilli displays the overall goal of capital punishment debates; the reduction of crime rates.
Along side of Alan Marzilli is author Anne Rooney. However, Rooney leans toward history than arguments in her book, Capital Punishment. All of the methods of execution are thoroughly discussed. Charts are shown to display different execution methods that are used in certain parts of the world, a total number of executions in the United States from 1936 until 2005, and a time ine of debates.
Although Robert Wolf claims his book, Capital Punishment, to be a balanced account of debates and cases, it is clearly exhibiting themes of abolition. “This development [of cutbacks in procedural protection] is yet another in the anguished and complicated history of capital punishment in the United States, a history that will surely become even more anguished and complicated as we execute more and more people” (Wolf 11). Beliefs of death penalty supporters are rarely mentioned. Wolf's most prominent values is that “it's not a rational process because a key factor is what kind of attorney you can afford, so the death penalty is commonly imposed on poor people” and that spur of the moment actions are not thought through to the consequences (Wolf 72). “If fear of death is, indeed, a fact, another fact is that such fear, however great it might be, has never sufficed to quell human passions” (Wolf 55). And yet there are many differing opinions that have not yet been touched on.
Two out of five highly opinionated sources were in accord with the abolition of capital punishment, two books were informants whose focus was educating the reader, but only one book supported the cause. Until the biblical writing, “thou shalt not kill,” is erased from history and capital punishment displays a direct decrease in crime, there will always be controversy of capital punishment's justness. Should one be deemed to decide another's fate?
Makes me feel stupid.
And hungry.