Death And Justice By Edward Koch Summary
Death and Justice: How Capital Punishment
Affirms Life
I can both agree and dissagree with Edward Koch 's opinions in his essay called Death and Justice: How Capital Punishment Affirms Life. Some of the arguments that he has presented seemed valid, however, he didn 't supply enough facts to back up what he was saying for many of his examples. It seemed to me that most of what Edward Koch was saying had more to do with his own opinion on capital punishment than on any type of reasearch he has done on the topic.
In one part of his argument he states, "No other major democracy - in fact, few other countries of any description - are plagued by a murder rate such as that in the United States." (Koch 196). He does go on to provide the reader with some "statistics" on how the murder rate in our country has increased over a period of years. But he is not quoting from any sources to prove his point. On this point, I 'm not sure if I do or don 't agree with Mr. Koch. I don 't know first hand if those "statistics" were accurate or not. They may have been, but since he 's not quoting from anything, I am still …show more content…
Koch also tries to enlist the Bible as an ally for the death penalty; however, once again, he does not provide us with any information or quotes to back him up. The best that he came up with was, "The biblical viewpoint has been upheld by philosophers throughout history" (Koch 197). He does go on to name some "great thinkers," but he never proves what they supposedly said or why they said it. He names another man by the name of Jeremy Bentham and describes him as ambivalent, but that is all. He forgets to inform us, the average college student, just exactly who Jeremy Bentham is, what he does, (or did,) and just what exactly did he have to do to back up his fact that "the Torah specifies capitol punishment" (Koch 197). Since Mr. Koch is trying to use this man as an example, I feel it would only be fair to his potential readers to let us know who this man was or
Affirms Life
I can both agree and dissagree with Edward Koch 's opinions in his essay called Death and Justice: How Capital Punishment Affirms Life. Some of the arguments that he has presented seemed valid, however, he didn 't supply enough facts to back up what he was saying for many of his examples. It seemed to me that most of what Edward Koch was saying had more to do with his own opinion on capital punishment than on any type of reasearch he has done on the topic.
In one part of his argument he states, "No other major democracy - in fact, few other countries of any description - are plagued by a murder rate such as that in the United States." (Koch 196). He does go on to provide the reader with some "statistics" on how the murder rate in our country has increased over a period of years. But he is not quoting from any sources to prove his point. On this point, I 'm not sure if I do or don 't agree with Mr. Koch. I don 't know first hand if those "statistics" were accurate or not. They may have been, but since he 's not quoting from anything, I am still …show more content…
Koch also tries to enlist the Bible as an ally for the death penalty; however, once again, he does not provide us with any information or quotes to back him up. The best that he came up with was, "The biblical viewpoint has been upheld by philosophers throughout history" (Koch 197). He does go on to name some "great thinkers," but he never proves what they supposedly said or why they said it. He names another man by the name of Jeremy Bentham and describes him as ambivalent, but that is all. He forgets to inform us, the average college student, just exactly who Jeremy Bentham is, what he does, (or did,) and just what exactly did he have to do to back up his fact that "the Torah specifies capitol punishment" (Koch 197). Since Mr. Koch is trying to use this man as an example, I feel it would only be fair to his potential readers to let us know who this man was or