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Contemporary role of punishment
The problem of punishment
Capital punishment effectiveness
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Recommended: Contemporary role of punishment
Since 1976 there has been a total of 1437 executions in the United states. It is legal in 31 states, that leaves only 19 states where it is illegal. Is it really effective? Should we be taking someone else life into our own hands? What if they are wrongly convicted? Taking someone else life into our own hands is not fair. We are not God we cannot decide who lives and who dies. For example, let’s say that that John Doe kills Mary one night while she walking home. He followed her home and raped and murder her. Shouldn’t he have to rot in jail for the rest of his life and think about what he has done. If you give him the death penalty, then it is over quick and he doesn’t have to sit and think about his actions. We shouldn’t make it easier on them, make that son of gun sit in a jail cell and be miserable. As long as the death penalty has been around there has been probably countless victims who were innocent. Those people never got to live a full life and because of the courts they missed out on grandchildren, a career all those things we love about life. Do you really want that blood on your hands for killing a person who just at the wrong place at …show more content…
So let’s say you were the juror on the John Doe case and you are convinced that Mary is lying but all of the other juries think he is guilty. You are in the room for hours trying to change their minds and see things from your point of view, they just aren’t agreeing with you. So you finally cave and say he is guilty so you can go home. After all you have children and a home to take care of, you can’t keep coming to the court room everyday all day your life is too busy for that. So he is found guilty and executed. Three months later new evidence is found and its proves that Mary was making up the whole story. You just send a man to be executed when he wasn’t guilty. Could you honestly live with yourself after
Many people are led to believe that the death penalty doesn’t occur very often and that very few people are actually killed, but in reality, it’s quite the opposite. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1,359 people have been executed as a result of being on death row since 1977 to 2013. Even though this form of punishment is extremely controversial, due to the fact that someone’s life is at stake, it somehow still stands to this very day as our ultimate form of punishment. Although capital punishment puts murderers to death, it should be abolished because killing someone who murdered another, does not and will not make the situation any better in addition to costing tax payers millions of dollars.
Historically, God was thought as the life giver and taker. I was told as a child that when someone died it was because God needed him or her. So are we as mere humans disobeying our Lord by ending a person's life that is suffering? Should ...
Since 1967, a total of 1392 executions have occurred in the United States ("Executions by Year"). What a shocking amount! This staggering number creates questioning on the topic of capital punishment. Is the death penalty really constitutional? Research and study over the topic leads to the conclusion that capital punishment should not be instituted in the United States for various reasons. The death penalty is immoral, unconstitutional, and inaccurate due to human errors.
My thoughts on it are that it is a waste of money, time, and it is very inhumane. For one, everything involved in death penalty trials is very costly. Why do we waste money executing criminals? Executing a murderer isn’t going to bring the people they killed back to life.
Many prisoners in the past have been known to be killed before they were proven innocent. Many documented cases where DNA testing showed that innocent people were put to death by the government. This sometimes happens because there are defendants who are given minimal legal attention by often minor qualified individuals. The government has made many mistakes which are being wrong about convicting someone for something they didn’t do, and killing this person for the wrong reason. Putting the wrong person to death is the biggest mistake that can be made and the government cannot afford to make this mistake.
Two options are presented to a jury in a court of law: guilty, or non-guilty. In any case, there exists a third option no legal advisor is allowed to tell a jury. Despite the evidence presented, if a jury feels it is morally incorrect to prosecute a defendant, they have the power to acquit them. In order to maintain a free justice system, it is important for a jury to have the power to nullify the law under specific circumstances, much like in the case of John Peter Zenger.
or hundreds of years people have considered capital punishment a deterrence of crime. Seven hundred and five individuals have died since 1976, by means of capital punishment; twenty-two of these executions have already occurred this year (Death Penalty Information Center). Many U.S. citizens who strongly support the death penalty believe that capital punishment remains the best way to protect society from convicted killers. I, however, disagree; I do not feel that execution best punishes criminals for their acts. Instead, in my opinion, the administration of the death penalty should end because it does not deter crime; it risks the death of an innocent person, it costs millions of dollars, it inflicts unreasonable pain; and most importantly it violates moral principles.
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.
...already in there for life, there is nothing to stop him or her from killing other prisoners on a spree. The death penalty ensures more safety in that sense, because the prisoner will most likely consider his punishment of life sentence as bad enough and not want anything worse.
If an error occurs in the procedure, the criminal will face a painful and cruel death. Even more horrifying, an innocent person can be placed on death row. “The reality is that there are few innocent people on death row; the vast majority of these inmates did, in fact, commit the crimes for which they were found guilty. These killers brutally took the lives of innocent victims. By not recognizing the lives of their victims as sacred, they cannot claim their own lives are sacred. In the end, the death penalty is an individual punishment for an individual crime” (Bowman and DiLascio). Although this quote tries to offer a counterpoint to the argument that the death penalty should be abolished, it still admits that there are innocent people on death row. An innocent man placed on death row results in two casualties of innocent men while the brutal murderer sleeps peacefully each night. Errors in the death penalty can destroy families, terminate friendships, and disintegrate love and companionship. Since there is no guarantee that every person on death row is guilty, it is too dangerous to risk more innocent
The death row not only consists of murderers, but it could also include a large number of innocent people whose lives are at risk. In the past 35 years, over 130 people have been taken out of the death row because of new evidence proving their innocence. This shows that the death penalty process is very faulty and contains many errors when it comes to convicting a person of a crime. There was an average of three exonerations per year from 1973 to 1999 which soon rose to an average of five per year between 2000 and 2007 ( Cary, Mary Kate). The ...
Almost all nations in the world either have the death sentence or have had it at one time. It was used in most cases to punish those who broke the laws or standards that were expected of them. Since the death penalty wastes tax money, is inhumane, and is largely unnecessary it should be abolished in every state across the United States. The use of the death penalty puts the United States in the same category as countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia which are two of the world’s worst human rights violators (Friedman 34). Lauri Friedman quotes, “Executions simply inject more violence into an already hostile American society.”
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).
Murder should be punished in a manner similar to the way it was committed. A man convicted of a cold-blooded shooting murder such as a drive-by shooting should go before a firing squad. Each man in that firing squad would fire one at a time so the convicted would not know when the angel of death would come for him. A man convicted of strangulation murder should be hung at high noon. A man convicted of a beating death should be slowly beaten until death comes. A Jeffery Dahmer style murderer should suffer dismemberment and decapitation.