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Argumentative Essay: Re-Instating The Death Penalty

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Imagine someone has just been found guilty of committing a crime and is sentenced to death. You don’t know if they are innocent or guilty, but you have to execute them. You can hang them, gas them, inject them with poison or electrocute them- take your pick. The accused struggles against the tight belts that cross his recently shaved chest, groin, legs and arms but it is useless. He cries out for forgiveness, his blindfold dampening knowing what is to come. You pull the leaver and watch as the prisoners flesh turns bright red and swells and stretches to the point of breaking. His eyeballs roll out of his sockets and rest on his cheeks while his body convulses, shaking all over. Blood streams from his mouth, urine runs down his leg, and the …show more content…

I know that, you know that- it is a fact. How can we justify re-instating the death penalty with its permanent and irreversible nature? In America alone, one hundred and fifty individuals who were sentenced to death row have been exonerated since January 2015. Exonerated, acquitted, found innocent of the crime that human beings killed them for. Ray Krone was the one hundredth person exonerated from death row in America. Accused for a crime he did not commit, Mr Krone spent ten consecutive years in Arizona prisons, including thirty-two months on death row, before his innocence was successfully established in 2002 with a DNA test that proved another man had committed the murder he was accused of. If not for this simple test, an innocent man would have been killed and stolen away from his loved ones forever. Now that’s a crime. A U.S. death row study published in the Guardian revealed that 4.1% of defendants sentenced to death have been wrongly accused. How can you sit there and listen to facts like these and be okay with it, knowing that hundreds of innocent people have died because of our mistakes. Considering how fallible humans are by nature, how can we ever be totally sure if an accused is innocent or guilty? It is a crime against …show more content…

One of your arguments for capital punishment no doubt is about saving ‘taxpayers money’ but do you realise that once costs have accumulated after the long and complex judicial process required for capital cases, the death penalty can cost up to five times more than a lifetime of imprisonment. In Texas, one death penalty case costs taxpayers $2.3 million. These millions of dollars of tax payers’ money could be saved if the death penalty was replaced with lifetime imprisonment and it would also eliminate the risk of ending the life of an innocent person. This money saved could go towards productive goals to better our community such as education, public safety programs and even go towards giving support and services to crime victims and their

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