Death Penalty Synthesis Essay

Capital punishment is a subject that can be and has been debated for lengthy amounts of time. There are still many countries that perform executions today, but many of these countries differ from the United States greatly. While the death penalty has been used as early as eighteenth century B.C., there is no doubt that there are many factors that make the death penalty a questionable subject in the modern United States. The death penalty should not be utilized in the United States because it is costly, inhumane, and inaccurate.
The financial cost of the death penalty is one that is far greater than the cost of any other sentence. There are many things that drive the cost of the death penalty up that are not present in cases that end in a different sentence. Source A points out a few of the largest components to …show more content…
In the past twenty years DNA evidence has come to light that has proven one hundred and fifty three people innocent of the crimes that they were put on death row for committing (Source D). This means that one hundred and fifty three people were almost murdered for crimes that they did not commit. The error that occurs in deciding whether or not a person should be put on death row or not is described in Source D as, “criminal-justice systems are flawed because they rely on human beings who can err through honest mistakes, greed, fraud, and other frailties of the flesh.” Human beings are not perfect and make many mistakes, yet they are trusted to make claims and decisions that are quite literally life or death. Source E pokes fun at this margin of error by presenting a cartoon, stating that less than a quarter of all death penalty cases have no error in them. With error margins this large an excruciating amount of deliberation must be put into place about whether or not the death penalty should be a legal and humane option as punishment for