This is what my professor told me—— I have been looking at it, as I have had time—which was in very short supply for me this spring. I needed to be more timely however and I apologize for that. You have the materials her for a working paper so do not take anything I say too amiss. I think you are trying to abstract yourself and your reader into new language—perhaps as means of both expressing your concerns as you see them and trying to put issues in a new light. But as a policy paper it ends of being a distraction from the argument. You would be better off to take this up in a more straight forward manner I think. I will give you one or two examples. You discuss the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is not a pledge but a declaration—an intent and a statement of principle. It was titled in the English Language the Universal Declaration, not the Broad Articulation and it was a product of the United Nations General Assembly not the Joined Nations Common Get-together. These things have real names and function as a means to shared discourse. As a declaration, and not a treaty, the UN Declaration asserts a long term of objective. I should note that those states that led the effort cannot have opposed, at the time, all use of the death penalty as they had just hanged a number of important leaders of the German nation and almost uniformly still had the death penalty within their domestic laws. It is now true that most European countries have now eliminated the death penalty and made it a foreign policy goal of the EU(look up EU and death penalty, also European Convention and Court on Human Rights) to persuade other countries to eliminate it as well. So rather than making your case that the death penalty is bad for x reasons you have me thinking about why you are referring to the UNGA as the JNCG. For me the “passing penalty” is equally distracting. I think you are better off to most of the time put things in terms the most people recognize. The death penalty is much clearer for most readers. If you are going to use it explain that you are and why.
Then you can take up arguments and develop them—but do give them some development. Present the case you don’t like and respect it. Then show the counter-argument. So to give an example you note that some people want retribution but then say that that impartiality is better. But that is not obvious to everyone. Retribution is not, in any clear sense, for many people, worse as a form of justice than rehabilitation and reclaiming. Why is rehab and reclaiming better. So if you would you bring together the arguments for the death penalty and set them thematically against it and spend some time explaining why and from what perspective the death penalty ought to be eliminated. Retribution v. rehabilitation(and spend some time on this). The US is also a secular society the DP is really mandated in some Islamic societies. How does one deal with that. You note that religion comes into play in the US—particularly the eye for an eye old testament. Deterrence v. coarse society. Ethnic inequities. Error in judgment of guilt. Costs of imprisonment v. death penalty. Concentrate your moral case against the death penalty, maybe at the beginning of the paper and try to think why the notion that no one should lose their life to another including those who have committed the same outrage on others. You have some good arguments but if you could find some stats on a couple of issue it would be good. Deterrence, Ethnic inequities. Errors in finding guilty parties. I think you could spend about concentrated week repositioning, adding some stats, and maybe returning to more general discourse and you could get a good working copy.
Hope this makes sense. You have an working draft and that is what counts.
Best,