ngs. Futhermore, nothing prevents them from escaping or killing again while in prison. After all, if they have already recieved the maximum sentence available, they have nothing to lose. For example, in 1972 the U.S. Surpreme Court banished the death penalty. like other states, Texas commuted all death sentences to life imprisionment. After being released into the general prison populaton, according to Winters: Twelve of the forty-seven prisoners that recieved commuted sentences were responsible for twenty-one serious violent offenses aainst other inmates and prison staff. One of the commuted death row prisoners killed another inmate and another one killed a girl within one year of his release on parole.(21) This does not mean that every death row inmate would kill again if realeased, but they do tend to be repeat offenders. Winters states "Over forty percent of the persond on death row in 1992 were on probation, parole, or pretrail release at the time that they murdered" (107). Society has a right and a duty to demand a terrible punishment for a terrible crime. According to Walter Burns, an eloquent defender of the death penalty, execution is the only punishment that can remind people of the moral order that human beings alone live by (qtd in Hertzburg 4). Van Den Haag states that the desire to see crime punished is felt because the criminal gratifies his desires by means that the noncriminal has restrained from using. The punishment of the criminal is needed to justify the restraint of the noncriminal (30). Society has a moral obligation to see that civil government punishes all criminals, which includes enforcing capital punishment. Executing capital offenders helps to balance the scales of moral justice. The death penalty is religiously permissible according to certain passages in the Old Testament, particularly in the "eye for an eye" teaching advocated in Matthew 5:38. god requires capital justice for premeditated murder, when the...
