The death penalty administers justice because some people deserve death

The argument

The argument is retributive rather than consequentialist: it says nothing about deterrence, cost or crime rates, and rests entirely on what a punishment is for. In order for justice to be done, people must receive the punishments they deserve. On this view a sentence is not a tool for producing future outcomes but an answer to something that has already happened, and it is a just answer only if it corresponds in severity to the wrong it answers. From that principle a limit on imprisonment follows. For some criminals, a sentence of life in prison does not fit the severity of their crime. If punishments are to be proportionate, a system whose most severe available sanction is imprisonment has fixed a ceiling on how severely it can ever respond, regardless of what any particular offender has done. Crimes vary in gravity without any comparable ceiling; a scale of punishments that stops short cannot track them. At times, therefore, the only punishment that fits heinous crimes is death. The conclusion follows from what abolition would commit the system to in advance. If we prevent the criminal justice system from giving people what they deserve, we stop it from administering justice — not merely in the occasional case, but by design, since abolition removes the proportionate response before anyone knows which crimes will be committed. A system so constrained would still punish, but in the gravest cases it would be knowingly imposing less than was deserved, which on this account is a failure of justice rather than an exercise of mercy. For this reason we should not abolish the death penalty. It is a necessary component of our criminal justice system because some people deserve it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Although deservedness should certainly be a consideration, it is not the only factor that should decide a person's punishment. In some cases, the criminal justice system must give defendants mercy. As flawed human beings, we would be in trouble if we got what we deserved all the time. At certain points, everyone has received undeserved forgiveness, which means that we're all obligated to give others the same grace. We must extend criminals the same mercy we have received, and wish to receive, ourselves. For this reason, we should abolish the death penalty.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Proportionate desert is one aim of punishment among several. Deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and mercy all bear on a sentence, so what an offender deserves does not by itself determine what a system should impose. [Rejecting P2] That no lesser punishment fits certain crimes is asserted rather than argued. Whole-life imprisonment is available, and the premise gives no account of why it falls short beyond the intuition it is meant to support. [Rejecting P3] The move from what an offender deserves to what a state may do is the weakest step. Courts convict the wrong people, and a punishment that cannot be undone once carried out fails at justice in a way this premise never weighs.