The Death Penalty And Social Justice

The death penalty has been a social justice issue for several years. As many may know, the death penalty is the act of killing individuals. Although the death penalty is only to be distributed under certain circumstances and reserved for the worst crimes, that is not always the case. The death penalty has now raised an argument as to whether or not capital punishment is appropriate in a modern cultured society and also to questions about the justice of the trials and the dependability of the results. The variety of capital offences an offender may be put to death for various reasons, but many cases have been inappropriately dependent on the race and gender of the defendant. These questions gave rise to the current movement toward death penalty reform in the United States. The death penalty magnifies race and gendered inequalities causing controversy between who supports it and who is against it. Race and gender has become a social justice …show more content…
Lee Anne Bell and Maurianne Adams give different definitions of the term with very distinctive meanings. Lee Anne Bell (2010) in “Theoretical Foundations,” suggest that the term can be defined as the seeking of redistribution of resources, opportunity, and responsibility from the leading and fortunate groups in society (p. 22). According to Maurianne Adams (2010) in “Conceptional Frameworks,” social justice is a repeating cycle of oppression and social inequalities that were supposed to be based on equality of chance and justice (p. 4). When the issue of the death penalty is brought to light, many think of the unfair and injustice sentencing that has been wrongfully distributed. The power of the color of an individual’s skin and the gender of an individuals has become an outstanding advantage and disadvantage. This became a social justice issue when deciding who lives and who dies began to be based off of whether people of color are more violent and if men or men were more