Death Penalty Articles

The death penalty is a controversial issue in our society. There are many differing opinions on this subject, as we have seen in the articles by Mencken and Kroll. Kroll's article is more effective because it is full of pathos appeals, which, when used on such an opinionated and moral subject as the death penalty, really get to the audience. He neglects what his friend actually did to get sentenced to death and just describes to us how he died and the process of the death penalty, which makes the reader feel very bad for Robert Harris and have a negative view towards the death penalty. He also describes the death penalty very negatively such as when he says, "We were in the middle of something indescribably ugly. Not just the cold-blooded killing of a human being, and not even the fact that we happened to love him - but the ritual of it, the participation of us, the witnesses, the witnessing itself of this most private and personal act. It was nakedly barbaric. Nobody could say this had anything to do with justice, I thought." This really gets to the reader because of its pathos (emotional) appeal. The strong emotional appeal in this article is much for effective than the argument of katharsis, or using the death penalty to get revenge, in the Mencken article.