The Scottsboro Boys: Capital Punishment And Wrongful Executions

This term paper is on one of the most controversy discussion known as Capital Punishment. This is a topic in which the writer believes does not have a positive effect on decreasing crime in the world. For almost three years now, the writer has grown a passion for criminal behavior in some of the notoriety of a few crime cases that resulted in Capital Punishment and Wrongful Executions. One of my personal favorite crime cases in history is the Scottsboro Boys. This case represents an incident where five innocent African American men nearly faced execution after being accused and convicted of raping two white females on the back of a train back in 1931. This case is one of many reasons I am against capital punishment because it can lead to wrongful deaths of innocent men and women without justified evidences and witnesses. The writer is also
Capital Punishment was once considered ceremony opened to the public until the nineteenth century. Melusky and Pesto (2011) describes the watching of a criminal being executed as an, “quasireligious event in which the condemned man was expected to express his repentance and, in an early version of ‘Scared Straight’ to admonish the children brought to witness the spectacle not to follow his path of crime” (Melusky and Pesto:2). By the nineteenth century, many states had called to get rid of the death penalty. According to William S. McFeely, Michigan was the first state to remove the death penalty in 1846. Soon after, nine other states had also removed using the death penalty as punishment up until the end of World War I when half of the nine states and a few new states restored the death penalty. As of the summer of 2015, only thirty-one states use Capital Punishment, while nineteen of the fifty states has abolished Capital Punishment according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s