Ethics paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Ethics paper - Essay Example There are many lively debates surrounding the ethics, efficacy, and policy implications of capital punishment as they pertain to its use within the United States. Globally, the United States is one of about 60 nations that regularly employ this type of punishment. However, within the group of Western industrialized nations, it remains the only country that routinely puts people to death. To the extent that the United States shares similar legal and political systems with other Western industrialized countries, it has not followed the trend of most European and Western-hemisphere states that have abolished the use of capital punishment within the last four decades (Gunning et.al,2007). Americas modern system of justice has roots that are most often directly traced to the writing of Cesare Beccarias classic essay, On Crimes and Punishment. One of the primary ideologies that emerged from the doctrine was that a punishment should be proportional to the harm caused by a crime. Implicit in this approach is the notion that the most severe penalty, death, should be reserved for only the severest of crimes. Thus, the array of crimes for which the death penalty was deemed appropriate began to narrow. Another important consideration inherent to this school of thought is that the offenders responsibility or blameworthiness for the crime committed should also be considered in calculations of proportionality. In America, reform of the death penalty first began in Pennsylvania by Thomas Jefferson. Gaining the later support of Benjamin Franklin and William Bradford, Jeffersons efforts led Pennsylvania to become the first state to consider the culpability of the offender in the p roportionality argument. As a result, in 1794, Pennsylvania repealed the use of the death penalty for all crimes except first-degree murder, which required the offender to have premeditated the crime. This notion of culpability for the offense committed takes on distinct