Capital Punishment Is Wrong

975 Words2 Pages

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 …show more content…

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

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