Individual chapters examine the argument from deterrence, criticisms based on inhumaneness, and the physician's role in executions and its relationship to the moral status of the death penalty. They also discuss the irrevocability of the death penalty, and the arguments for abolition presented by Hugo Bedau in the 1987 book titled Death Is Different. Further chapters examine the overall system of sanctions within which arguments for or against the death penalty take place. Individual sections consider preventive detention of dangerous persons and medical quarantine, conviction and punishment of insane persons, and the concepts of sending messages and transmitting information through punishment. Additional sections focus on the system of penalties, the need for proportion between crime and penalty, punishment for allowing death rather than causing it, and deserved punishment. The analysis concludes that although justice does not require that murder or any other crime be punished by death, considerations of proportion and deterrence at the least, push in the direction of having the death penalty as the punishment for murder once punishment for lesser crimes becomes sufficiently severe. It also notes that a good case for abolishing capital punishment presupposes drastic reductions in other penalties but that such reductions are unlikely without a sharp decline in crime or increased understanding that severe penalties are costly and have little effect on crime rates. Chapter reference notes, index, and 157 references