Edward Koch analyzing his argument
Examination of Edward l. Koch’s essay “Death and Justice: How Capital Punishment Affirms Life” Edward L. Koch, former mayor of New York City, wrote an extremely controversial essay on the death penalty titled “Death and Justice: How Capital Punishment Affirms Life. ... Koch’s arguments that it is highly unlikely that innocent people are killed, that discrimination on death row is no longer the problem it once was, and that the death penalty defers murder are some of the arguments that plague his essay with misleading fallacies and false assumptions. Koch quotes Hugo Adam Bedau when he says it is “false sentimentality to argue that the death penalty should be abolished because of the abstract possibility that innocent persons might be executed.” Koch then goes on to say how Bedau’s study “fails to show that any cases occur. ... Only two years after Koch wrote his essay in 1985, Bedau also claimed, in his 1987 study, that 23 innocents have been killed due to the death penalty since 1900 (www. ... Koch must have overlooked many important statistics that contradict his argument.