Row

clearly indicates a racial bias within the execution of the death penalty and the larger criminal justice system as a whole. African Americans make up twelve percent of the United States’ population, but represent forty-two percent of inmates on death row (Marcus 2007). A study conducted in Maryland echoed these concerns and found that the death penalty is sought more often when the victim is white that when the victim is black, defendants who kill white victims are at a greater risk of getting…

other states are murder with 1 to 10 aggravating circumstances. In general, murder in the first degree and sometimes the second degree will get sentenced to death. It will be decided at the time of trial. Death row inmates have some characteristics. Almost like a trend. 55.8% of the death row populations are white, 98% are male, education level is 12th grade and 67.1% had prior felony convictions. The average age at the time of arrest was 28 years…

testing. Many death row inmates were convicted of their crimes when DNA testing was almost non-existent, which lead to many Americans being convicted of crimes that they did not commit. A research study implemented by Samuel Gross, Chen Hu, Barbra O’Brien, and Edward Kennedy (2014) found that almost four percent of U.S. capital punishment sentences are wrongful convictions, almost double the number of people set free, meaning around 120 of the roughly 3,000 inmates on death row in America are…

¨I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty seems appropriate¨ (Kevorkian). In the eighteenth century the death penalty was established by King Hammurabi. Back then the death penalty was the only punishment for a crime. Drowning, beating and burning where some of the methods that were used. This paper contains the history, positives and negatives of capital punishment. Today, society is torn between whether…

It is very true that in current times, the misuse of the death penalty leads to an increase, instead of a decrease, in murders. This is due to the belief of the criminals that even if/when they do get convicted, they get to sit in their cushy death row cells for years upon years. It is fairly common knowledge that if given the death penalty, the criminal will probably never be executed. The criminals are given free healthcare, internet, television and more instead of being punished for the…

Innocent people who have been mistakenly found guilty may end up spending years on death row not knowing when the ultimate punishment will be dealt out to them. This goes against American ideas of fairness and equal representation. Additionally the death sentence has its own racial bias. NPR reports that there is a link between what kind of victims a murderer targeted and if the murderer was put on death row. In terms of execution cases, “Black defendants had killed 270 white victims and 152…

Capital punishment has been in history from the beginning of the human race. There have been many types of capital punishment and people have made judgments for punishment from death to light sentencing. Capital punishment focuses on the death penalty. Capital punishment affects many people from the defendants to the family members left behind. The focus of this paper is that Capital punishment sentencing can have an outcome that is derived from jurors being swayed by the defendant’s race,…

Since 1973, “more than 150 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence, Florida had 26 alone” (DPIC 2). How could the criminal justice system fail so many people? Here is an example of a story with a duo on death row. In late September 1983, an 11-year-old girl named Sabrina Buie was found murdered in a soybean field in Robeson County. Within days, police got two local teenagers…

Penalty: a Thought Experiment.” LeBoeuf paints a picture of a post-World War II Germany that decides to reinstate the death penalty, and, with their “completely impartial” legal process, still has a disproportionate number of Jewish convicts on death row. No doubt, this would throw the world into an outrage, and rightly so. We could not then argue that the Holocaust had been completely in the past and had nothing to do with the statistical evidence shown. So why do we now? Slavery and…

has affected between five to ten percent of death row convicts. Having a mental disease may affect capital punishment in several different…