Death Penalty Continues to be a Controversial Topic

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The death penalty is a popular controversial topic throughout the world. Many people believe that it should be used on murderers, rapists, terrorist, arsonists, etc. as retribution and that those convicted deserve the punishment. Those people who are for capital punishment feel that criminals will stop committing such heinous crimes because they know that the result will be death if they are caught. However, the death penalty is proven to not reduce murder rates or any crime rates at all. In fact, the states that do have death row have much higher crime and murder rates than those states that do not use the death penalty. Capital punishment is excessively and unnecessarily expensive, and costs much more money than holding the convict in prison for the remainder of their life. Capital punishment is supposed to be fast and painless, but sometimes the death is quite long and extremely painful and in some cases causes mental illnesses. The death penalty also every so often kills innocent people and goes against our rights and values. The death penalty should not be used as a deterrent to lower murder rates by the reasons of inefficiency, high expenses, extensive sufferings, murdering innocent people, and immorality.
Capital punishment is the execution of a person convicted of a crime and it has been around since the eighteenth century. When the death penalty first came about, the different types of deaths were crucifixions, hangings, stoning, drowning, burning alive, decapitation, etc. Today, the different ways to die are not the same. The person being sentenced to death can choose from lethal injection, the electric chair, the gas chamber, a firing squad (where you kneel down in a line of men and numerous people shoot at you), and ha...

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...shment costs such a large amount of money that it costs less to just keep the person in prison for the rest of their life. When using the death penalty, the person convicted and sentenced to death is not supposed to feel any pain and is supposed to die rather quick so they do not suffer. However, there have been cases that the person being executed did not die right away, therefore suffering an immense amount of pain. Many people who have been killed by capital punishment have later been found innocent, but the penalty is irreversible and goes against peoples’ rights and beliefs. The death penalty should not be used as a deterrent to lower murder rates because it does not serve its purpose in deterring crime and murder rates, it costs an unaffordable amount of money, the deaths are sometimes long and painful, innocent people are murdered, and it is outright immoral.

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