Wrongful Arguments Against Capital Punishment

The most fearful aspect of capital punishment is the possibility of the state or government executing the wrong person. As a previous advocate for the death penalty, the argument of innocent people on death row was hard to swallow. I continuously believed in our capital punishment system and had little doubts that people on death row were innocent. However, with a little research, it became blatantly obvious that was not the case. For instance, 135 people on death row have been exonerated and released from prison since Furman v. Georgia (Hance et al., 2013). To some, this number may seem little considering that Furman v. Georgia was decided in 1972. But, we must keep in consideration that these people would have been wrongfully executed if it were not for the development of DNA evidence (Warden, 2013). As Hance (2013) points out, “the inescapable conclusion is that the number of wrongful convictions greatly exceeds the number of exonerations.” Let us take for an example the case of Jesse Tafero, a man executed in Florida in May 1990. Two years after his execution, his co-defendant, Sonia Jacobs, who was convicted and sentenced to death on exactly the same evidence as Tafero was released after a U.S. Court of Appeals determined …show more content…
As a previous supporter of the death sentence, I relied heavily on this particular topic. I am a strong believer in an “eye for and eye” but can capital punishment actually impede on true justice? That is, when executing someone, what we have to learn from that individual is executed with them. Let us take for example Theodore “Ted” Bundy. Ted Bundy was a serial killer who traveled to states killing young women and was ultimately executed in Florida 1989 (Bailey & Goldshlager, 2011). Though Bundy confessed to over 30 murders before he was executed, many experts believe that number is a fraction of the actual amount (Bailey & Goldshlager,