hat cell alone because of her depression, but does it justify her cutting short the lives of the two children who had no idea of their oncoming death. "All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears," Says Joseph de Maistre, a eighteenth century French diplomat. He is right; if we give up our punishing a deadly criminal, then we throw our society into chaos and let the criminals freely do as they please. I would know I was safe if anyone that tried to fatally harm me would be put to death. But in this society when someone can kill someone, get sentenced to life, get paroled and then freed to go about and do the same crime again frankly scares me. Another thing that scares me is the fact that this country has softened up on criminals. Its hard to think that now days everyone has a right, even though when you go against the law and are put in prison, you are suppose to be stripped of your rights. Not so anymore. Justice in the nineties has slacked up a bit. "In the late 1950s, on any given day there were about two hundred prisoners awaiting execution," says Hugo Bedau of Tufts University, Massachusetts. "Hardly any remained on Death Row for more than a year." Today, there is 15 times that number, and many have been there for over a decade. Opponents of the death penalty say this statistic is a moral outrage. Supporters see it as undermining a key advantage of the death penalty over life imprisonment: it saves taxpayers the huge cost of keeping murderers locked up (Matthews, pg.s 38-42). Most of those against capital punishment argue that the forms of execution are gruesome. While some might be seen that way at first, others offer the advantages that both parties can agree on. In 1994 there were two hu...
