Murder is Murder, No Matter What
Capital punishment. Execution. Legalized murder. These are all names for the same thing: the death penalty. The death penalty is the worst punishment that the government can give you. Crimes punishable by the death penalty include federal murder, treason, terrorism, and some military laws. A jury made up of 12 people decide whether the death penalty should be applied. A person is then killed by lethal injection, although electrocution, hanging, and gas chambers have been used. Doesn’t that sound absolutely horrid? I believe that the death penalty is wrong because of many reasons. The death penalty should be become illegal because of the possible innocence of people, it’s not used anymore, and of all the inhumane …show more content…
What does it mean by inhumane reasons? It means that the death penalty should be banned because it is cruel and done without compassion. According to the Eighth Amendment in the Constitution, which is what this country was founded on, cruel and unusual punishment is prohibited by the federal government. But there are still cases today that question the use of the death penalty because of the cruel and unusual punishment. There have been 27 cases where executions have gone wrong and the people being executed have suffered greatly before finally dying. Take the case of John Evans for example. He was executed on April 22, 1983, in Alabama. He was executed by electrocution. But the first jolt of electricity made Evan’s leg catch on fire. They shocked him again, and smoke was seen escaping from his temple. Doctors came and examined him and discovered a heartbeat. But they just kept on shocking him. A heartbeat was found on two different occasions by two different doctors, but they kept shocking Evan’s until he was dead (Radelet 2). If that’s not cruel and unusual punishment, then what is. Another inhuman reason is because there are so many biases surrounding cases that concern the death penalty. First, there are social biases. The richer a person is, the better lawyer they can get, and the chance of them being found innocent increases dramatically. When a poorer person commits a crime, they have to get an overworked public defender who doesn’t spend a lot of time on the case. A public defender can miss evidence and get an innocent person killed because of it (Death Penalty Focus: Facts 9). Another bias is racial biases. Juries are more likely to convict black people than any other race. Currently, more than 53% of the people on death row are black. 90% of all men executed for rape (before the Supreme Court ruled that people convicted of rape could not be
Capital punishment. Execution. Legalized murder. These are all names for the same thing: the death penalty. The death penalty is the worst punishment that the government can give you. Crimes punishable by the death penalty include federal murder, treason, terrorism, and some military laws. A jury made up of 12 people decide whether the death penalty should be applied. A person is then killed by lethal injection, although electrocution, hanging, and gas chambers have been used. Doesn’t that sound absolutely horrid? I believe that the death penalty is wrong because of many reasons. The death penalty should be become illegal because of the possible innocence of people, it’s not used anymore, and of all the inhumane …show more content…
What does it mean by inhumane reasons? It means that the death penalty should be banned because it is cruel and done without compassion. According to the Eighth Amendment in the Constitution, which is what this country was founded on, cruel and unusual punishment is prohibited by the federal government. But there are still cases today that question the use of the death penalty because of the cruel and unusual punishment. There have been 27 cases where executions have gone wrong and the people being executed have suffered greatly before finally dying. Take the case of John Evans for example. He was executed on April 22, 1983, in Alabama. He was executed by electrocution. But the first jolt of electricity made Evan’s leg catch on fire. They shocked him again, and smoke was seen escaping from his temple. Doctors came and examined him and discovered a heartbeat. But they just kept on shocking him. A heartbeat was found on two different occasions by two different doctors, but they kept shocking Evan’s until he was dead (Radelet 2). If that’s not cruel and unusual punishment, then what is. Another inhuman reason is because there are so many biases surrounding cases that concern the death penalty. First, there are social biases. The richer a person is, the better lawyer they can get, and the chance of them being found innocent increases dramatically. When a poorer person commits a crime, they have to get an overworked public defender who doesn’t spend a lot of time on the case. A public defender can miss evidence and get an innocent person killed because of it (Death Penalty Focus: Facts 9). Another bias is racial biases. Juries are more likely to convict black people than any other race. Currently, more than 53% of the people on death row are black. 90% of all men executed for rape (before the Supreme Court ruled that people convicted of rape could not be