Sex offenders and rapists should be given the death penalty

Introduction

Violent assaults on children in several highly publicized incidents have spurred states to pass new laws cracking down on sex offenders. A majority of states now notify residents of communities where a sex offender has been released. Some detain especially dangerous sex criminals for an indefinite term of mental treatment once their sentences expire (Andre, 162). These laws are being challenged in the courts by those who charge they punish individuals for the same crime twice. Moreover, some treatment experts say the laws are based on a misconception about who commits sex crimes. Most convicted sex offenders are relatives or friends of their victims. With therapy, many can learn to control their sexual obsessions, some clinicians maintain. But the mental health profession remains divided over whether rehabilitation works.

Discussion

In today's society there are wide range of deviant acts. Across the nation crime overall has decreased, but sex offenders have not. I am going to be discussion sex offenders and their actions, why they commit these deviant acts, and statistical analysis of sex offenders. A sex offender is any person who lives or works in any community and who has been convicted of a sex offense, or someone who has been adjudicated as a child offender or as a delinquent juvenile by reason of a sex offense. Or it is a person released from incarceration or parole or probation supervision or custody with the department of youth services for such a conviction or adjudication, or a person who has been adjudicated a sexually dangerous person or a person released from civil commitment (Donna, 95).

The author of Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean, came to understand the need for retribution through her work as a spiritual consultant to prisoners on death row in Louisiana. As Prejean recounted in her book, later made into a popular movie, the family of a young man who had been brutally murdered desperately wanted his murderer, Robert Willie, to be executed. Moreover, they had been angered by Prejean, who had ministered to Willie but had ignored the victim's family.

The victim's girlfriend, who had been kidnapped and raped by the same man, was more ambivalent about the execution's role in enabling her to get on with her life. “Robert Willie's death . . . definitely reduced the fear I had to live with, [and] while I wasn't at all sure that was justification enough to execute a man, I couldn't help the fact that I simply felt better knowing Robert Willie was dead,” wrote Debbie Morris. “But I do know this: Justice didn't do a thing to heal me. Forgiveness did.” (Gordon, 1995, 805)

Streib acknowledges that his views are not widely shared. “Between 75 and 80 percent of Americans support the death penalty,” he says, “and that hasn't changed very much in the last 10-15 years.”

The major change during the 1930s and '40s was the involvement of federal appeals courts in reviewing state court death sentences. Until then, death sentences had ...