Any advice on my essay🙏
this is a section B essay I tried, literally any advice at all would be appreciated I’m very lost as to what the better answers look like. If anyone could suggest if this would help an Oxbridge law application or not really I’d be grateful 🥲
Should the death penalty be reintroduced for those convicted of serious offences?
The death penalty should not be reintroduced. It offers no novelty sense of justice previously denied, nor does it recognise how the current system actually promotes a harsher form of punishment than death that perhaps is overlooked in its potency.
My reasoning is thus: spending every day doing the same things in the bleak environment of a prison with no hope for reprieve is worse than death. The most precious thing a person has is their life, and condemning them to four walls to ‘live out’ the rest of it denies them the most important aspect of being: truly living.
Therefore, the argument that an eye for an eye approach should be taken (using the death penalty for a murderer) in order to be as vindicated as one can be after such an event is lost on me as the best way to obtain justice. The primary purpose of punishment for an extremely serious offense is retribution, as the offender would otherwise be given a life sentence with no chance for rehabilitation as opposed to the penalty. Consequently, the current system of routine solidarity for a biologically social being is perfectly satisfactory as retributive justice, because it denies humanity from the human before taking the life.
When you condemn someone to prison you don't just take their life. You take their freedom, and force them to face the absence of their autonomy every second they wake. It is abject terror of this form of existence that rather effectively deters a person from committing a crime. The penalty would only subtract from this deterrence by offering a way out. So, critically, introduction of the death penalty would not deter murderers any more than the current system.
Perhaps then, the recurring debate must be centred around the victims' call for this certain type of justice which takes exactly what was taken. To this, I offer a look into the harshest prison systems in the world, where the people inside live with the hope for the reprieve that death will offer them. If anything, if retribution needs to be satiated, looking toward changing the prison system itself, rather than the penalty, would satisfy the innate need for vindication much better if calls for harsher punishment are still prevalent.
Proponents of the penalty would argue against the subjectivity of my stance, and reason that whether it is or is not worse than death is a weak reason to deny the victims the option of the penalty, if that is what they desire. They then promote this by saying the penalty would relieve the British taxpayer of funding costs, allowing the money to be diverted into improving other areas of the system. Undeniably, it would save funds. Yet my answer is simple: the money saved will never eliminate the possibility of a wrongful death.
In the case that the system gets it wrong, and an innocent person suffers the penalty, it is irreversible and, crucially; unforgivable. With technology rapidly advancing, the chances for mistaken conviction are slim, but they are never zero.
I argue that the opportunity to save a convict from prison after however many years of a wrongful conviction is an incredibly powerful one. Not only does it save the person, but it shows that the state is capable of trying to repair wrongdoing and willing to admit to mistakes however damning to their institutions.
I argue that no amount of money redistributed after introducing the penalty will ever equate to the amount needed to justify the murder of merely one innocent convict. Again, the most valuable thing we have is life, and prioritising funds over potential wrongful deaths however fleeting the chance sets a dangerous precedent for our society going forwards. It is only easy to refute this by continuing to debate in theoreticals by not placing oneself in the agonising predicament of a wrongful convict. The possibility is never zero.
Conclusively, the penalty would only impact the current system negatively. Promoting the eye for an eye way of thinking for justice is redundant, when one could have a hand for an eye instead. Often, we forget the permanence of death, and with it the sanctity of life. Therefore, denying the penalty symbiotically respects both by ensuring life can be restored from a wrongful conviction, and damned for a wrongful action. The death penalty should not be introduced.