Capital Punishment Should be Terminated

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Recommended: The death penalty and race

The death penalty, also known as capital punishment, is exactly how it sounds. The convicted is sentence to death because of the heinous crimes they have committed by the legal process. “Most death penalty cases involve the execution of murderers although capital punishment can also be applied for treason, espionage, and other crimes” (ProCon, 2014, para1). The eighth amendment protects people from excessive bail, excessive fines imposed, or cruel and unusual punishments. The courts would have to find the death sentence to be proportional to the crime they had committed. The issue with implementing capital punishment, other than the possibility of innocence, is racial and gender disparities within the sentencing.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (2011), “More than an estimated 15,269 Americans have been executed since the inception of the death penalty dating back to colonial times” ( para 1). There have been 1,348 people sentenced the death penalty since 1976. Of the 1,348, 56% were white offenders, 35% black, and 7% were Hispanic (Statistics Brain, 2014). While there does not seem to be a racial bias in the actual sentencing, 76% of the victims were white. This gives a major implication that if the defendant were to kill a white person, their chances of being one of those previously mentioned statistics, increase dramatically. The Death Penalty Information Center (2014) studies found that black defendants with a nonblack victim had a heightened chance of the death penalty over any other combination whether it is white murdered black, black murdered black regardless of the severity in which the crimes were committed
Racial minorities only make up 35% of those that had been sentenced to the death penalty however, ...

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Death Penalty Information Center (2014) STUDIES: Racial Composition of Jury Pool Strongly Affects Probability of Convicting Black Defendants retrieved from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/studies-racial-composition-jury-pool-strongly-affects- probability-convicting-black-defedants

Death Penalty Information Center (2014) Women and the Death Penalty
Retrieved from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/women-and-death-penalty
ProCon.org (2014) Should the Death Penalty be Allowed retrieved from http://deathpenalty.procon.org/
Statistics Brain (2014) Death Penalty Statistics retrieved from http://www.statisticbrain.com/death-penalty-statistics/
West's North Carolina General Statutes Annotated Currentness Chapter 15A. North Carolina Racial Justice Act (2013) retrieved from http://www.ncids.org/Motions%20Bank/RacialJustice/AmendedRJA.pdf

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