Essay, Research Paper: A Murder Cannot Be Forgiven

Murder Can t Be Forgiven.
A person can be involved in many different kinds of crimes. Each crime has its own punishment. Sometimes you get away with bail, or by serving community hours, and at other times you can be thrown to jail for a more serious crime. Very often people consider those punishments too severe compared to the crimes, especially if they are the ones committing it. Crimes such as murder, rape and sadism are too harsh for any penalty invented. The only way the criminal can repay for his crime is by death. Although the death penalty is the cruelest punishment, it s the best way to penalize the heartless, cold-blooded criminals.
Even though we might not agree with the death penalty, we often realize that it s the only solution for some cases. As Edward I. Koch states in his article: We may not like the death penalty, but it must be available to punish crimes of cold-blooded murder, cases in which any other form of punishment would be inadequate and, therefore, unjust (Koch, 491). Edward Koch is trying to say that there are crimes committed by people who have something wrong with their mentality, people like murderers, rapists and sadists. Those people have to be punished not just to make sure that they won t do it again, but because of something that they already did, and nobody could change it anymore. A good example of this would be the article from the newspaper that I read, about a man who kidnapped and raped sixteen boys, cut them in pieces and buried them in his back yard. I personally think that this psychopath should be punished sufficiently for the crime that he did, and the only thing that he deserves is an electric chair. I don t think that he should get away with crimes like those by sitting in jail for a couple of years, and then getting out to start killing again. Even though it might seem wrong to fight violence with violence, he still should experience the same torture as those sixteen boys that were killed. This would be the only way that he could accept responsibility for the crime.
Our government spends numerous amounts of funds in order to support those criminals in jail. For example San Quentin prison expends about fourteen thousand dollars yearly for each prisoner that sits there (San Francisco Chronicle statistics). That money is taken from our pockets, from our taxes. So, why should we put out the money to support those murderers? Why should we pay for the crimes that they do? So the criminals could eat, drink, sit in jail, and not worry about anything else, after killing or raping someone that we know, or someone who is related to us. This is not fair or just. I would rather give this money to students or to schools, than to the criminals. Education is our future, not the killers that sit in jail for the rest of their lives and have no use for our society at all. So I don t even see a point of keeping them there because I personally think that a life sentence is like a death penalty since you die in prison either way. So it is to the benefit of the law abiding citizens to give those criminals the death penalty. This would cut down the government expenses used for the clothing, health care, and education for criminals.
Sometimes it happens to be that the hard core criminals can t be rehabilitated, and the only thing that is left is death. On the other hand, each person should have a second chance. Prison could give criminals a good opportunity to change their views on life. Some people use that opportunity to change themselves, but some don t. A journalist Mike Royko gave us a good example of a person who didn t change. In the article Death to the Killers , the author quotes a mother who says: I m the mother of one of the innocent victims. A man walked to the emergency demanding a shot of penicillin. When he heard no for an answer, he stomped out, went to his car, came back with a shotgun and killed my son. He was sentenced to life, but after several years the sentence was reversed on a technicality- it being that at the time of his trial it was mentioned that this was his second murder (Royko, 354). It is obvious that this convict didn t change his way of life after his first murder, and he killed somebody for the second time. As I already mentioned earlier, there is no point to keep a prisoner in jail for the rest of his life for his second assassination because it s just a waste of our money. He had his second chance, but he didn t use it. So, the only thing that he truly deserves is an electric chair. The death penalty will not give him an opportunity to kill somebody again.
A human s life is very precious, and people should not have the power to take it away. Unfortunately, we are not living in a perfect world and there are criminals who take upon themselves the right to kill others. When one decides to take a life, he or she should be ready to accept that their life can be taken by others. Our government and our laws are set up to make sure that citizens live in a safe environment. Thus, it is their responsibility to take certain measures when crimes are committed. Murder is an enormous crime that can t be punished by anything but a death penalty. If a person kills ones then it is something that he or she can do again. By keeping these killers in prison and collecting numerous amounts of taxes to support their living, we are in a way saying that murder can be forgiven. But if every one of us looked at the murderers from the eyes of a close relative of the victims, we would all agree that the only just punishment in this case is an eye for an eye, a murder for a murder. To say it in other words, killers don t deserve to live.