urposes is the dispute that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment. The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution, condemning cruel and unusual punishment, is used to protect the death penalty. (Greenberg A-10) The fallacy of this argument is that it appears to be a "red herring" argument, one that takes attention away from the facts of the case. When the constitution was drafted, capital punishment was practiced widely in this country, yet was not specified as wrong of cruel and unusual. Many of the framers of the constitution endorsed the death penalty, as did philosophers from which the constitution draws from. John Lock went as far as to say, "...that murder is not intrinsically wrong. (Bedau 125)Man, as he is bound to preserve himself and not quite his station willfully, by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind." (Bedau 277) An argument against the death penalty is the basic moral issue of conservation of human rights and humanity. The argument of retribution would be even easier to dismiss if it consisted only of a basic thirst for revenge. As stated by Bedau "Society must manifest a terrible anger in the face of a terrible crime, for nothing less will suffice to remind us of the moral order by which alone we can live as human beings." (Bedau 121) This is a serious moral argument. Opponents of capital punishment must be willing to answer it on its own terms. They say that "... the death penalty demeans the moral order and execution is not legalized murder, nor is imprisonment legalized kidnapping, but it is the coldest, most premeditated form of homicide. It does something almost worse than lowering the state to the moral level of the criminal: it raises the criminal to the moral equality with social order." (Haag 280) Indeed, one of the ironies of capital punishment is that it focuses attention and sympathy on the crimi...
