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The ineffectiveness and unfairness of the death penalty
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The ineffectiveness and unfairness of the death penalty
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More and more inmates are being put to death for unreasonable actions. The death of these inmates is becoming a goring problem in the US. Many men and women are being sentenced to death for actions caused by mental conditions or for doing things that would simply get them jail time years ago. Death Row is growing and becoming unfair to many individuals because of the harsh conditions, cost to carry out the sentence and severity of the punishment. Many individuals undergoing death row truly face the worst conditions. Most do not deserve to be put to death in the first place. Some of these inmates are even placed to have a do over when the sentence fails to be carried out. For example, Rommel Brown was sentenced to die in 1984 and officials could not get the lethal injection into his vein. He now has to undergo …show more content…
Many murderers have severe mental disorders that they really cannot help. These people deserve to be placed in mental hospitals, not a hospital with bad conditions. For example, in Ohio, Arkansas and Texas several individuals have been placed in Death Row who have schizophrenia (Beitsch). If a criminal has a severe mental disorder at the time of their crime they deserve to have a fair trial and have the option to seek help in a mental hospital. These individuals cannot help what is going on inside their mind and the actions they do because of this. Megan Testa, a psychiatrist, makes a good point when saying, “If these people aren’t seeing the world for what it truly is, if they can’t concentrate and think things through, if they’re so delusional or depressed their thinking isn’t reality-based anymore, they should not be held to the same standard” (Beitsch). The inmates who have disabilities the are placed in Death Row are not capable of thinking clearly and avoiding the actions they pursue in some cases. They are just doing what their mind tells them or listening to the voices that they are
From the documentaries you could see that death row is a cruel place which is torture alone and not only does the prisoner suffer for the time he/she is in there but so does their family and friends who are behind them. It must be hard on the prison staffs who become close to them, at the end of their sentence they have to kill him/her.
An example of a high profile death row inmate was a man by the name of John Wayne Gracy. Gracy was a Chicago resident who was convicted of murdering and raping thirty-three young boys. The police found twenty-six of his victim’s bodies underneath his house. To any person with a conscious, this man was a demon. Although Gracy was sentenced to death in 1980, he spent over fourteen years on death row. This killer spent every day knowing he was going to die soon, every day he wondered when his execution was going to be. This punishment is much worst than spending time in jail. Should a man who murdered and raped thirty-three boys be allowed to live and die of old age? And have the possibility of going back into society? Gracy is not fit to have that opportunity. Some other notable death row inmates are Ted Bundy, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Darrel Rich. These three men were beyond rehabilitation and if let go into a prison system would cause
Mental illness affects one in four adults every year ("NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness | Mental Illnesses"). Mental illness effects thousands who may not even be aware of it. Many who are aware do not receive treatment until something bad happens in result of not receiving treatment. These illnesses affect all aspects of the person’s life. They often do things without the knowledge of what they are doing. Many people who do have these illness commit crimes without the knowledge of the fact that they are doing wrong. People often do not believe that having a mental illness gives people the right to commit a crime, and it doesn’t. It merely suggests that the person who committed said crime was not aware of their actions therefore cannot be held accountable for the wrongdoing. Families of the victims usually are oblivious to what mental illness is and own they do end up educating themselves wondering why these people never got help so their loved one may have been spared. Mentally ill persons should be exempt from the death penalty because they are in a questionable state of mind, they will become low risk if they receive treatment, and the families of the victims do not want them to receive the death penalty.
The death penalty, as administered by states based on their individual laws, is considered capital punishment, the purpose of which is to penalize criminals convicted of murder or other heinous crimes (Fabian). The death penalty issue has been the focus of much controversy in recent years, even though capital punishment has been a part of our country's history since the beginning. Crimes in colonial times, such as murder and theft of livestock were dealt with swiftly and decisively ("The Death Penalty..."). Criminals were hanged shortly after their trial, in public executions. This practice was then considered just punishment for those crimes. Recently though, the focus of the death penalty debate has been on moral and legal issues. The murderers of today's society can be assured of a much longer life even after conviction, with the constraints of the appeals process slowing the implementation of their death sentence. In most cases, the appeal process lasts several years, during which time criminals enjoy comfortable lives. They have television, gym facilities, and the leisure time to attend free college-level classes that most American citizens must struggle to afford. Foremost, these murderers have the luxury of time, something their victims ran out of the moment their paths crossed. It is time this country realized the only true justice for these criminals is in the form of the death penalty. The death penalty should be administered for particularly heinous crimes.
Wouldn’t it be completely irrational to sentence every mentally ill individual to jail purely because they suffered from a mental illness? Often, mentally ill people behave in an eccentric manner and allure the attention of police officers who do not differentiate the mentally ill from mentally stable people and immediately charge them with misdemeanors. There are approximately 300,000 inmates, with the number increasing every year, which suffer from a mental illness and do not receive proper treatment. Jails are not adequately equipped to care for mentally ill inmates, which can lead to an escalation of an inmate’s illness. Society has failed to provide enough social resources for citizens suffering from psychiatric illnesses in its community, transferring mentally unstable individuals between mental institutions and jails, when in fact adequate aid such as providing proper medication, rehabilitation opportunities, and more psychiatric hospitals in communities is a necessity to reconstitute these individuals.
Critics of capital punishment hold that because most homicides are situational and are not planned, offenders do not consider the consequences of their actions before they commit the offense” (Mooney, Knox, & Schacht, 2015, p.133). Most people on death row committed their crimes in the heat of the moment, usually while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or, in some cases, due to suffering from mental illness. These individuals are highly unlikely to make rational decisions based on a fear of future consequences for their actions. Criminals are mainly concerned with whether or not they’ll be caught, not what might happen to them afterwards.
Main Point 1: Imagine someone that has been accused of murder and sentenced to death row has to spend almost 17-20 years in jail and then one day get kill. Then later on the person that they killed was not the right person.
The capital punishment has been cited as a reasonable sentence by those who advocate for retribution. This is essentially when it comes to justice so that people take full responsibility for their individual actions. Studies have proved that the decision to take away life of a person because they committed a certain crime serves to perpetuate the crime in question. It also serves to enhance the progress of organized and violent crime. It has been noted that various flaws in the justice system has led to the wrong conviction of innocent people. On the other hand, the guilty have also been set free, and a plethora of several cases has come up when a critical look at the capital punishment has been undertaken. Killers hardly kill their victims deliberately, but they probably act on anger, passion, or impulsively. In this regard, it is not proper to convict them exclusively without
Since the mid 1900s, individuals with mental illness have been sent to jail rather than to receive proper treatment. These patients should be able to receive treatment and care because it will be increasing the safety of not only the person themselves but also others surrounding them.
The issue of executing mentally ill criminals has been widely debated among the public. They debate on whether it is right or wrong to execute a person who does not possess the capacity to think correctly. The mental illness is a disease that destroys a person’s memory, emotion, and prevent one or more function of the mind running properly. The disease affects the way a person thinks, feels, behaves and relates to others.When a person is severely mentally ill, his/ her ability to appreciate reality lack so they aspire to do stuff that is meaningless. The sickness is triggered by an amalgamation of genetic, and environmental factors not a personal imperfection. On the death penalty website, Scott Panetti who killed his mother in-law and father-in-law reports that since 1983, over 60 people with mental illness or retardation have been executed in the United States (Panetti). The American Civil Liberties Union says that it is unconstitutional to execute someone who suffered from an earnest mental illness (ACLU).Some people apply the term crazy or mad to describe a person who suffers from astringent psychological disorders because a mad person look different than a mundane human being. The time has come for us to accept the fact that executing mentally ill offenders is not beneficial to society for many reasons. Although some mentally ill criminals have violated the law, we need to sustain a federal law that mentally ill criminals should not be put to death.
The people in support of the death penalty say that if murderers are sentenced to death, future committers will think about the consequences before they actually proceed with the crime. However, most murderers don’t expect or plan to be caught and weigh their fate. Because, murders are committed when the murderer is angry or passionate, or by drug abusers and people under the influence of drugs or alcohol ("Deterrence (In Opposition to the Death Penalty)”). Therefore, it will not deter future crimes and will actually increase the amount of murders because of society. As previously stated, the death penalty isn’t proven to prevent future murders and/or crimes because it actually increases the likelihood of committing murder. It doesn’t prevent future murders because it would upset the family and friends of the person who was executed. For example, if someone was executed by the death penalty and it was someones family member, then the person who lost their loved one by the execution would most likely commit murder in anger. If that person was executed the next family member would get angry and so on. The cycle would never end and would have more murders. There is no final proof that the death penalty is a better deterrent than other options. Not having the death penalty would be better because it could save many lives. For example, United States a country that uses the death penalty has a higher murder rate than Europe or Canada which are countries that do not use the death penalty. To get a little specific, the states in the United States that do not use the death penalty have a lower murder rate than the states that do.
Between 1977 and 2010, an estimated 8,000 people were on Death Row in the US and out of those 8,000, more than 1,200 were actually executed (Siennick, 2012). Policy makers and scholars have been especially interested in whether the death penalty serves a crime-control function by deterring prospective murderers (Siennick, 2012). This debate on whether or not the Death Penalty is an effective deterrent is important to our society because we need to understand the impact of this ultimate and final punishment. Expectations of deterrence follow from the basic idea that potential murderers decide whether to kill after considering the benefits and costs of killing (Siennick, 2012). The Death Penalty as punishment can be a deciding factor to a potential murderer when they make the decision whether to kill someone or not. There is assorted evidence on whether or not this happens and there isn’t a chosen method to gather data that fully supports this idea.
During the spring semester I read Evangelium Vitae: The Gospel of Life. Paragraphs 27 and 56 of this encyclical prompted a discussion of the death penalty with other students. Their first reaction was that the Pope was against it and that he was saying that the penalty has no justification. There was general resistance to the suggestion that while the Pope's attitude toward the death penalty is, to put it mildly, unfavorable, he did not flat out say that it was immoral, wrong, without justification.
I believe that the focus should be more on helping those who are mentally ill, than simply using the death penalty as a form of deterrence. The death penalty does help deter criminals from committing in some ways, but there are probably other ways that could be used and would work more
With social media as it is today, more often than not, the offender is guilty until proven innocent by the courts. Alternative sentencing is also a part of the neoclassical theory. Community service, psychological treatments and ankle monitoring bracelets are some forms of sentencing just to name a few. If someone is mentally ill, they punishment may not necessarily fit the crime, because the offender may not realize what they did was wrong. There would need to be an alternative form of sentencing for these individuals. Sticking them in a prison cell, is not going to help them in any way shape or form. Mentally ill individuals are not prominent in prison and some do receive the exact help they are needing. Alternative methods may not be the best way to deter crime and stricter punishment possibly should be enforced. Once offenders know the sentence is going to be detrimental, then they may rethink about committing more crimes. Not to the extreme of like some foreign countries, that if you steal, they cut your hands off, but just more severe punishment or harsher punishment the first time they appear in court, instead of waiting until the third or fourth