Despite being a liberal democrat her entire life, my grandmother, along with her family, has always supported the death penalty. She believed that there were some crimes committed where the criminal deserved to die. I remember having a conversation with her in 2014 where we discussed the death penalty. I told her I opposed it and she told me I was wrong for that and that some people did not deserve to live after committing very serious crimes, such as murder or in certain rape cases. However, recently we had a conversation about this topic again. During this conversation, she told me that in the past few years she has changed from supporting the death penalty to opposing it. My grandmother was born in 1946 in a rural town in Kentucky. During
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The new knowledge she has obtained which made her change her stance on the death penalty is the increase in people being found innocent due to DNA evidence. The authority behind this is the Innocence Project, a project started in 1992 that works to exonerate wrongly convicted individuals using DNA analysis. She found out about the Innocence Project through various news shows she watched that showed cases of it. She also read a lot of articles online or in the newspaper that pertained to this. The cases she saw and read about made her support for the death penalty drop because she no longer thought it was worth it to execute people if there was a possibility of executing an innocent …show more content…
A 2016 poll done by the University of Kentucky showed that 72.4% of Kentuckians questioned believe that the death penalty should be halted until problems within the system are fixed. The problems they are referring to are the cost and time of the death penalty (Stotelmyer). These results vary differently from the 2013 results mentioned earlier. This change in support of the death penalty in Kentucky and within my grandma shows that she is part of a community that is now assenting to a new belief, being against the death penalty. As of October 29, 2013, support for the death penalty is at the lowest it has been in 40 years (Historical). This shows a growing trend in America as more people begin to disagree with the death penalty and use it less. The death penalty has been used less and less in the United States over the past couple years
The new knowledge she has obtained which made her change her stance on the death penalty is the increase in people being found innocent due to DNA evidence. The authority behind this is the Innocence Project, a project started in 1992 that works to exonerate wrongly convicted individuals using DNA analysis. She found out about the Innocence Project through various news shows she watched that showed cases of it. She also read a lot of articles online or in the newspaper that pertained to this. The cases she saw and read about made her support for the death penalty drop because she no longer thought it was worth it to execute people if there was a possibility of executing an innocent …show more content…
A 2016 poll done by the University of Kentucky showed that 72.4% of Kentuckians questioned believe that the death penalty should be halted until problems within the system are fixed. The problems they are referring to are the cost and time of the death penalty (Stotelmyer). These results vary differently from the 2013 results mentioned earlier. This change in support of the death penalty in Kentucky and within my grandma shows that she is part of a community that is now assenting to a new belief, being against the death penalty. As of October 29, 2013, support for the death penalty is at the lowest it has been in 40 years (Historical). This shows a growing trend in America as more people begin to disagree with the death penalty and use it less. The death penalty has been used less and less in the United States over the past couple years