Argumentative Essay: Capital Punishment In The United States

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Capital Punishment, a cruel way to end another human’s life would you not say? That is the opinion of eighteen states in the United States. As of April 30, 2015, there have been a total of 1,407 executions since 1976 (www.deathpenaltyinfo.org). Capital punishment dates back to 1976 where the Supreme Court used death penalty as a way of maintaining the minorities after the Civil War (University of Richmond Law Review, Stephen Bright, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org). Essentially, capital punishment was very much tied to race. As of this day racial bias plays a key role between the defendant’s race and the race of the suffering by influencing the imposition of the death penalty. The death penalty should not be allowed to be practiced as a way …show more content…
They have to be around the many dangers inside a facility while waiting for their date of execution. Cruel and unusual punishment is in the Eighth Amendment of the Ten Bill of Rights. It states that punishment that is unacceptable due to suffering, pain, or humiliation if inflicted on the person that is subjected to it. Even though capital punishment is not treated as cruel and unusual punishment as stated by the Supreme Court, other factors play into this twisted definition. For example, a case where ex-marine Jerome Murdough was affected by schizophrenia and arrested then charged with a $2,500 bail. He could not post bail which landed him in an isolated cell in Riker’s facility. He died with a body temperature of 103 degrees due to hyperthermia. This was considered cruel and unusual because the state locked him up in an isolated cell that trapped heat which resulted in Jerome’s death.. The press announced that Jerome Murdough was “baked to death”. (Cruel and Usual Punishment in Jails and Prisons, www.latimes.com). Cruel and unusual punishment was not intended here, but it happened. Riker could have prevented this from happening by using a cooler cell which would not be the case to break the Eighth Amendment. Other factors in a jail facility may not be hyperthermia or hypothermia. In some cases, inmates are either contracting diseases from the unclean jail, and / or sexually assaulted. “Sexual assaults and sexual activity are well known to occur in prisons, but prisoners rarely have access to protection, such as condoms, that can help prevent sexually transmitted diseases.”(Martin Garbus, www.latimes.com). These sexual assault cases are treated in most cases as cruel and unusual punishment, but nothing has been done thus

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