Capital Punishment

After reading the article titled, “A Defense of the Death Penalty” by Louis P. Pojman, I can’t help but to agree with his point of view. When he first brought up that his evidence supporting the fact that the death penalty deters potential murders, I thought that it was a joke. He introduced his evidence as “common-sense.” I thought he was going to go nowhere with that point. However, when he likened it to the hypothetical example, “Imagine that every time someone intentionally killed an innocent person he was immediately struck down by lightening” it made a lot more sense. If that actually happened, I doubt that there would by many, if any, murders of innocent people. I feel like this is a very strong point because some people who argue that capital punishment does not deter crime do not realize that not every criminal who commits a capital crime receives the capital punishment; if every capital offender received the capital punishment, I doubt that there would be much argument that the capital punishment does not deter murders. If a criminal were guaranteed to be put to death for committing a capital offense, there would be significantly less capital offenses committed. There is no evidence to back this up because there has never been a time when the death penalty has been guaranteed to be put to use for certain crimes, but the common-sense stance supports it fully. Not to offend any abolitionists, but you would have to be just a straight-up incompetent person to think that if the capital punishment were guaranteed to capital offenders that the amount of capital-crimes would not decrease tremendously. I find it funny that abolitionist claim that the death penalty does not deter crime, and also claim that there is no evidence to support that it does deter crime; I know that the fact that the main evidence to support deterrence is common-sense is, more or less, weak evidence, but I don’t see any plausible evidence supporting that the death penalty in no way deters murderers. My objections to capital punishment is that it would be hard to draw the line of what crimes deserve it and which crimes do not; it would be even harder to determine who draws this “line” and dictates who receives which punishment. Also, I think it would be hard to thoroughly carry out a trial with the aim of giving the criminal the death penalty in a swift manor. Trials that are for the purpose of determining whether someone should receive the death penalty or not usually require a long time because proper, sufficient evidence must be presented and analyzed.