Bryan Stevenson's Point Of View Of The Death Penalty

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Capital punishment is a controversial topic in that people can only really have two opinions on the matter. Either you believe that it is acceptable to kill someone for their wrong doings, or you do not. I never really formed my own opinion on capital punishment until this past election season, when I started researching state bills I would be voting on. I realized that there are both good and bad aspects to the death penalty and all that comes with it. There are many points of view that can be used when talking about capital punishment. From a consequentialist retentionist’s point of view, the death penalty prevents future crimes from occurring, because those who have the want/need to commit crimes would fear capital punishment and those …show more content…

However, Bryan Stevenson’s argument against capital punishment makes me question its overall viability. Stevenson said “the pervasive and indelible taint of racial discrimination reveals a fundamental problem endemic to capital punishment” (Stevenson, 378). The number of African Americans and Latinos prosecuted in the United States is much higher than white people, and it has always been this way. Stevenson says that the unfair treatment of minorities starts with their arrest and carries on throughout their case until sentencing. Paul Cassell, however, believes the opposite. Cassell says “once arrested for murder, blacks are actually less likely to receive a capital sentence than are whites” (Cassell, 374). Both parties provide statistics that support their arguments, but Cassell specifically calls out a portion of Stevenson’s argument, saying that he used “specialist statistics” to make his case more sound, when in reality they hold no more power than mass market statistics. Cassell basically says that abolitionists are looking for reasons to say that our justice system is racist, but they are focusing on areas that had innate racism threaded into their culture from early on. I personally cannot decide whether Cassell or Stevenson is right. They both provided an immense amount of proof backing up their claims, but the crazy liberal in me believes there will always be racism in our justice system. Clearly not everyone working to create a safer nation is deliberately trying to arrest/jail/kill minorities, but there will always be a select few that are. Whether you are for or against capital punishment, there are sound cases for both

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