For many people, capital punishment is fair and just. However, some people disagree with that assumption and some people consider the death penalty to be cruel and unusual punishment. Capital punishment is unthinkably cruel, morally wrong, and has been proven not to deter criminals. There is also a question of innocence. For those wrongly convicted, the death penalty is irreversible. No one would wish that on his or her conscience.
There are five different forms of capital punishment: hanging, firing squad, electrocution, injection, and gassing (foxnews.com). None of these methods used for killing convicted criminals are physically or morally humane. For instance, when John Louis Evans was electrocuted in April 1982, it
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There will also be other feelings of anger, hate, sadness, depression, and confusion. In the end, most want the “eye for an eye” solution, but on the other hand, others stop and think about the situation for a moment before jumping to conclusions. They ask themselves, “who gave that criminal the right to take a life? No one did.” It is not the criminal’s right to decide who gets to die when, how, and where. On that same note, it is not the right of the jury, judge, or executioner to decide when a fellow human being should die. People who commit such heinous crimes are likely not in a rational state of mind at the time the crime is committed. These criminals are many times mentally ill and should be treated as such. Most likely, people in that deranged frame of mind cannot be rehabilitated, but others should not kill them for being ill either. If someone has a heart attack while driving and hits a child walking to school, we do not sentence him or her to death, but rather we rehabilitate that individual. We do not hold that person accountable for the act either. Another key thing to consider is those who are wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit. Between 1973 and 2004 there were 7,482 prisoners sentenced to death of this total thirty-five percent of the inmates were spared from …show more content…
Does it really work though? Today there are at least thirty-one states that administer the death penalty (cnn.com). In 2009, a study showed that eighty-eight percent of the nation's top criminologists believed that the death penalty does not deter criminals (aclu-de.org). The murder rates in states with the death penalty is 4.7 percent while this number drops to 3.1 percent in states without the death penalty (aclu-de.org). For instance, the murder rate in Manhattan, NY dropped steadily for ten years even though the District Attorney opposed and refused to seek the death penalty. The murder rate in Chicago, IL dropped also decreased significantly in the first 7 years after Illinois suspended executions (aclu-de-org). To answer to the question previously asked, it seems the death penalty does not deter criminals. In fact, capital punishment may actually have the opposite effect on society. Southern states have executed far more people than the northern states, yet the South has a higher violent crime rate then the North and is followed by the Mid West, West, and Northeast (ucr.fbi.gov). People who commit violent crimes usually do not think he or she will get caught and, therefore, continue their rampage. The appeals process does not help matters either, due to the fact that it can take several years to complete an entire appeals process. In the case of Robert Alton Harris, who murdered two
I do not consider the death penalty to be cruel and unusual punishment for persons convicted of one or more murders. For instance, my example of a convicted criminal deserving of the death penalty is Andrea Yates. I believe the only adequate justice for the murder of her five children is that she be given the death penalty. What she did to those children was certainly cruel and unusual and since she was given a fair trial by a jury of her peers and found guilty she be subject to death due to the heinous nature of the multiple homicides she committed. To spite my personal disdain for her actions under the law she and persons like her are still entitled to a fair trail (which she already had), as well as the appeals process, but I feel strongly that the death penalty should be used in place of life sentencing.
Dieter, Richard C. "Innocence and the Death Penalty: The Increasing Danger of Executing the Innocent." DPIC. Death Penalty Information Center, 1 July 1997. Web. 12 Dec. 2014. .
Capital punishment is something no person should endure, no matter how awful the committed crime may be. It is a cruel and sick punishment, for example, someone who has killed somebody has to undergo various gruesome and awful forms of capital punishment such as electrocution where they strap you to a chair and 1000 watts of electricity flow through your body or decapitation where the person is restrained to a wooden device with a sharp blade and then the blade is released or even immurement where the person is left to starve and dehydrate to death. When they are convicted to capital punishment, they are just waiting for death, and how slow and/or painful the procedure might be.
Capital punishment remains a cause for debate with people continuing to disagree. on what cruel and unusual punishment consists of. Cruel and unusual punishment being defined as torture or a deliberately degrading punishment, in no way does the death. penalty falls into this category. Having the death penalty in our society deters potential violent offenders from committing crimes, saves the government money, and guarantees that offenders will not commit these crimes again.
There are many types of executions used since the introduction of capital punishment. Some of the examples are execution by hanging, shooting or firing squad, and guillotine. When a criminal or convict is executed through hanging, he or she is suspended by a noose or ligature around the neck and then they
The death penalty ?cruel and unusual punishment.? At one time in history around six hundred people were executed, and in those six-hundred eighty of them were innocent but still executed (Thomas 2). Many people say that the death penalty is lawful. They think that if the punishment is carried out by the government and not by one person it is fine, and it is not cruel and unusual punishment (Carmical 2). Yes, the men who constructed the constitution supported the death penalty, but times have changed and so has the constitution. The constitution should abolish the death penalty (Carmical 5).
Capital punishment is unconstitutional, and violates human rights; a point of view rarely seen when debating the topic. Everyone talks about deterrence, everyone talks about justice for the victim, but no one seems to remember that even though the person responsible for a crime, whatever the nature of this crime is, is still a human being with constitutional, and human rights just like all of us.
To this date, Seven hundred and seventy two criminals in the U.S. alone have been
The death penalty has been around for centuries. It dates back to when Hammurabi had his laws codified; it was “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Capital punishment in America started when spies were caught, put on trial and hung. In the past and still today people argue that, the death penalty is cruel, unusual punishment and should be illegal. Yet many people argue that it is in fact justifiable and it is not cruel and unusual. Capital punishment is not cruel and unusual; the death penalty is fair and there is evidence that the death penalty deters crime.
Extreme Situations Can Morally Justify the Use of Capital Punishment The use of capital punishment has progressively become problematic since the very first day it was put into practice. There are many great arguments both for and against capital punishment, but in my opinion, the benefits of capital punishment outweigh any possible negative aspects. Although capital punishment sounds extreme, sometimes it is necessary when people execute extreme crimes. I would like to argue that in certain situations, the use of capital punishment is morally acceptable. In order to defend my standing in this argument, I will reason that the use of capital punishment has many benefits that trump any possible objections.
Some even claim that it is cruel and unusual punishment. I would like to shed light on the issue and inform everyone as to why we should keep the death penalty and possibly even use it more than we do now. First of all, it is hard for anyone to argue that we already use the death penalty too much because facts say that we hardly use it at all. Since 1967, there has been one execution for every 1,600 murders. There have been approximately 560,000 murders and 358 executions between 1967 and 1996(UCR and BJS).
Capital Punishment is defined as the legal infliction of the death penalty. The death penalty is corporal punishment in its most severe form and is used instead of life long imprisonment. Putting people to death that have committed extremely terrible crimes is an ancient practice, but it has become a very controversial issue in today's society. Capital punishment has been used for centuries, even the Bible contains over thirty stories or incidents about a person put to death for a crime they committed. Public executions stopped after 1936. The death penalty has been inflicted in many different ways. Today in the United States, there are five ways that the death penalty is performed. These criminals are put to death by a lethal injection, electrocution, lynching, a firing squad, or the gas chamber. These punishments are much less severe than the forms of execution in the past. In the past, people were executed by crucifixion, boiling in oil, drawing and quartering, impalement, beheading, burning alive, crushing, tearing, stoning, and even drowning. The methods used today compared to those of history are not meant for torture but instead for punishment for heinous crimes and to rid the earth of these dangerous people. The majority of America supports the death penalty.
...cibly take back what a robber took by force. It would be wrong to imprison someone that illegally imprisoned someone else. It would also be wrong for the police to drive over the speed limit to peruse someone who was speeding. The death penalty is a deserved and just punishment for murder. It does deter some murders, which saves an unknown number of innocent lives. These reasons are why, through all the controversy, three-quarters of Americans continue to support capital punishment.
Today's system of capital punishment tolerates many inequalities and injustices. The common arguments for the death penalty are filled with holes. Imposing the death penalty is expensive and time consuming. Each year billions of dollars are spent to sentence criminals to death. Perhaps the most frequently raised argument against capital punishment is that of its cost. Other thoughts on the death penalty are to turn criminals away from committing violent acts. A just argument against the death penalty would be that sentencing an individual to death prevents future crimes by other individuals. However, criminals are not afraid of the death penalty. The chance of a criminal being sentenced to death is very slim. The number of inmates actually put to death is far less than it was decades ago. This decrease in number shows that the death penalty is faulty. With that being true, many criminals feel that they can get away with a crime and go unpunished. Also, the less that the death sentence is invoked, the more conflicting it becomes when it is actually used. Alternative can be found to substitute for the death penalty. A huge misconception of the death penalty is that it saves society the costs of keeping inmates imprisoned for long periods of time. Ironically, the cost of the death penalty is far greater than the cost of housing a criminal for life. Appeals on the death penalty become a long, drawn-out and very expensive process. There are those who cry that we, the taxpayers, shouldn't have to "support" condemned people for an entire lifetime in prison-that we should simply "eliminate" them and save ourselves time and money. The truth is that the cost of state killing is up to three times the cost of lifetime imprisonment (Long 80). ...
Capital Punishment is a controversial topic discussed in today's society. Capital punishment is often not as harsh in other countries as we may call harsh in our country. There is a heated debate on whether states should be able to kill other humans or not. But if we shall consider that other countries often have more deadly death penalties than we do. People that are in favor of the death penalty say that it saves money by not paying for housing in a maximum prison but what about our smaller countries that abide by the rule of the capital punishment. If one were to look at the issues behind capital punishment in an anthropological prospective than one would see that in some cases no one would assume that capital punishment here in the U.S. is bad. Now those opposed say that it is against the constitution, and is cruel and unusual punishment for humans to be put to his or her death. I believe that the death penalty is against the constitution and is cruel and unusual punishment. The death penalty is cruel because you cannot punish anyone worse than by killing them. It is an unusual punishment because it does not happen very often and it should not happen at all. Therefore, I think that capital punishment should be abolished, everywhere.