Abolishing The Death Penalty

915 Words2 Pages

Lately, it seems as if the death penalty has been in the news a lot. One is always hearing about an innocent man going free because of DNA testing, or protests outside of jailhouses as criminals are being put to death. Just recently, the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia has fueled the debate even further, making many wonder what the debate is about. If a person commits murder, the logic goes, then that person should be killed too. An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth. But what many do not realize is that the death penalty is not without its faults. What makes the death penalty a conscientious issue is the underlying problems that are going on behind the scenes. The death penalty affects everyone and is not applied equally to all, and thus should be abolished to maintain the dignity of the United States and its judicial system.

Capital punishment is not new to American culture. For many years, "the death penalty was a cornerstone of the American criminal justice system" (Friedman, 2007, p. 8), and it wasn't until the 1960s that capital punishment started to be seen as anti-American, even immoral. Many people argued "that the capital punishment violated the Eight Amendmant's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment" (Friedman, 2007, p. 9), and that the death penalty was wrong because they felt the government should not be killing its citizens, even if that citizen committed a crime as atrocious as murder. But the Supreme Court disagreed, especially when certain criminal codes were rewritten so that the death penalty applied to only certain cases. For example, in Texas, capital punishment is reserved only for certain crimes, which includes killing an on-duty public safety officer, a child under ten years old, and ...

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...shed is that it is not applied equally to all defendants. "One stable pattern is that the offenders are more likely to be sentenced to death when victims are white rather than black" (Petrie 630). This hardly seems fair, as it implies that white victims are more valuable than victims, something that should not be true in the eyes of the criminal justice system. If murder is murder, then the justice handed out should be equal to all who commit such a crime.

Works Cited

Boys, Stephanie. (2011). The death penalty: An unusual punishment America is inflicting upon itself. Critical Criminology, 19(2), 107-118.

Friedman, Lauri S. (2007). The death penalty. San Diego, CA: Reference Point Press.

Petrie, Michelle A., & Coverdill, James E. (2010). Who lives and dies on death row? Race, ethnicity, and post-sentence outcomes in Texas. Social Problems, 57(4), 630-652.

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