One of the death penalty's biggest advantages is deterrence, causing people to not want to commit violent and serious crimes because they know the punishment that would soon be given to them. John McAdams, a professor of political science, states "If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call." McAdams is stating that rather them not killing murderers, and not deterring other murderer, rather than killing them and deterring the soon to be murderers, we are saving lives of innocent people. To make this effective, we must enforce this punishment soon after the criminal is confirmed guilty, just as if a child was instantly burned after putting his hand in a stove. If the penalty is given faster, it is proven to be more effective.

Retribution is exemplified in the Bible very much. An eye for an eye, for example, was a common punishment given in that time period. The basic argument of retribution is "all guilty people deserve to be punished, only guilty people deserve to be punished, guilty people deserve to be punished in proportion to the severity of their crime." (BBC 1) If we were to strictly stick to these rules, all murderers would be subject to the death penalty, it is exactly "a taste of their own medicine." Nobody forced them to do what they did, so they are putting this on themselves. It is a fair and just punishment for the severity of their crime.

In the case of capital punishment, this completely does away with the chance of re-offending their crime. Although it is a very rare case for a prisoner to break out and commit their crime again, this assures safety for other inmates and guards. People who commit such severe crimes are commonly mentally ill, and are unable to be rehabilitated into a normal citizen once again, this removes all dangers of this person ever committing something again.

In many cases, when the criminal was notified that they might be subject to the death penalty, many of them would help the police to try to reduce their sentences. When given the knowledge,

As a not so normal argument, the Japanese do uphold the death penalty in their very stressful civilization for a different reason. They use the death penalty to enforce that bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to good people. This gives their citizens hope, because it is teaching them that if they keep following the rules as they should, a reward will come in the future. A national statistic is that 81% of the Japanese agree with this penalty in their country (BBC), keeping the death penalty legal in majority.

Haiku deck formatting did not let me format it into MLA requirements.