The Death Penalty Should Be Abolished

Elliot Spitzer states, “Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don 't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.” Although the Death Penalty is meant to kill the ones that have murdered, many innocent people have been executed due to the ignorance of facts during trial. Since this has come to me and my partner’s attention, we are resolved that The United States should change its penal code to abolish the death penalty. The Death Penalty is execution following someone’s conviction of murder or any other serious crime. Abolish is to end the observance or effect of. The Penal Code is a set of criminal laws of a particular country, society, etc. Our courts are not steady, which is why we need to abolish the death penalty.

Since the state has no power to give life, it should not exercise its power to take a life either. After all, the judicial system is not a fool-proof system. The risk of putting an innocent human being to death by capital punishment, cannot be ruled out. The only purpose it serves is retribution or revenge. Therefore, the death penalty must be abolished. The death penalty is prone to errors that may have led to the execution of wrongfully convicted people. There have been 330 post-conviction DNA exonerations here in the U.S (Innocence Project).

Albert Einstein, a physicist and philosopher of science, “once said, no problem can be solved with the same level of thinking that created it” (Einstein). The intelligent man expressed his ideas clearly that if a killer kills someone and we also kill the killer then what would be the difference between us and the killer because we both are killers. The Death penalty was influenced by Britain. The practice was brought by European settlers for practice in U.S. The first recorded execution in the new colonies was Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608. Kendall was executed for being a spy for Spain (“Part I”). According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 31 States in the United States allow the death penalty and 19 states do not allow the death penalty (“Deterrence”). The death penalty should be abolished in our society because it is not an effective crime deterrent, it puts a strain on our economy, it may result in the loss of innocent lives, and it promotes racial discrimination.

Capital punishment has been part of the criminal justice system since the earliest of times. But opponents have argued that the death penalty is racist, economically unjustified, and in violation of the United States Constitution as "...cruel and unusual punishment" (“Chronology”). However, today much of the debate over capital punishment is about whether it is morally right to sentence a person who has committed a serious crime to death. This paper will address the moral issues in the controversy over whether capital punishment should be abolished.

Abortion is a sin. The death penalty should be abolished. Donald Trump will make America great again. Fairlife is better than Trumoo. I don’t necessarily agree with all of these statements, but they are all widely discussed topics today. Did any of the comments make you feel uneasy?

The death penalty, also called capital punishment, is the method some countries use to punish people who have committed violent crimes. In the United States, the death penalty has been abolished in nineteen States, but it is used by the other thirty-one States. The debate on whether the death penalty should be abolished or not continues in these States. At the present time 56% of the people in the U.S. support the capital punishment according to the Pew Research Center (Less Support for Death Penalty....). The support of the capital punishment has had a significant decline in the last decades in the United States if it is compared with a survey in 1996 where the support was 78% (Pew Research Center). The people who support the death penalty believe that it is effective, but it is not. The death penalty is not effective because it does not stop crime, is really expensive, sends a contradictory message, hurts people, and is not justice.

I do not agree with this statement. Given the conditions presented there is no moral reason to continue using the death penalty. In this case the death penalty cannot be said to be optimific (producing the best result) unless you hold the value of justice ahead of the value of society. To argue for this perspective requires an extremely skewed perception of value and if, as I will show, the death penalty provides no tangible benefit to society its use should be discontinued.

Humans have the right to live. Humans can’t live and survive alone, that is why we live in a society. In a society, exists people with power. The people with power, are the ones who make the decisions. They are also the ones who make our laws and rules. Everybody has to follow the laws and rules, or they will get punished. Laws and punishment change though, which is a good thing. For example, a lot of countries have abolished the death penalty. There are countries today that still use the death penalty, but the crime has to be bigger and more serious than before they punish them. If we go a hundred years back, all countries had the death penalty, and if we go even further, some people were executed for stealing. How do people get

In this paper I will be arguing why capital punishment is still necessary. The topics I will be discussing are: is capital punishment constitutional. Should there be a standard what types of execution should be administered. Is capital punishment an actual deterrent? How the death penalty may actually save the lives of those on death row. The perpetrators of the most egregious crimes left alive belittle the life or lives that they have taken and offer no sense of justice in the legal system. Capital punishment has acquired a stigma due to how it is applied and how death row inmates are executed. Capital punishment has been in the United States since it’s founding. It has been a tool of the judiciary for giving a sense of justice to those families that have had to lose loved ones. It serves to remove criminals that have violated the most sacred law of the social contract, permanently. The reason for capital punishment is to invoke justice against those who commit the most heinous crime, murder.

Capital punishment, or the death penalty, has been a part of the American Justice System since the begging, but for years it raised much controversy over its social issues, questioning its validity and fairness. The death penalty is the sentence of execution given to someone convicted of a capital crime such as murder or treason. Many civilizations and early societies used the death penalty before in history. Common explanations to be sentenced include war crimes, treason, murder, and espionage. Formerly, capital punishment was accompanied by torture and performed publically. It was often believed to be unprejudiced because it is retribution towards criminals who committed heinous acts. In contrast, it is currently a controversial debate whether or not the death penalty is socially acceptable as many see it is inhumane. The United States currently has five forms of execution include: hanging, beheading, chair electrocution, lethal injection, lethal gas, and firing squad (Gray). Each of them is cruel in their own way. Punishing a person with death is outdated, barbarous, and many nations evolved so they reprimanded this penalty years ago. Government sanctioned capital punishment is wrong and it should be abolished because it could potentially kill the innocent, denies people of rehabilitation, denies a citizen’s right to live, and overall does not benefit society.

There is a multitude of reasons as to why certain individuals either want the death penalty or not. With this, it is important to take the opinions of those with first-hand experience into account. By understanding a personal account, it becomes much easier to understand the differing sides to the debate. To start, in a Forbes article titled, “Considering The Death Penalty: Your Tax Dollars At Work”, Kelly Phillips Erb shares the story of a man named Gordon Steidl, who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced

Death, a dark and mysterious activity, the ultimate price for committing a capital crime (SC #18). A jury selected at random decides the fate of the offender. Throughout history, the idea of capital punishment has been brought into question. The argument that always arises is if capital punishment should be abolished or not. Capital Punishment has an extensive history and a debatable future; reasons such as religion, morals, justice, and satisfaction have caused differing views among Americans, resulting in multiple sides and changing viewpoints.

As society has advanced and time has progressed, it has become apparent that capital punishment should be abolished worldwide. Around the world, various countries continue to practice this brash, inhumane punishment. The legal system is intended to regulate citizen’s behaviour which aims to provide a smooth functioning society. When someone is sentenced to death, the legal system loses the “fair” aspect of the proceedings, as under no circumstances is the death penalty “fair”. Capital punishment should be abolished because it violates Section 12 and Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom, it goes against the teachings of the church, and it creates the possibility for someone to be wrongfully executed.

In 1492, when the Europeans came to the new world, they brought the practice of capital punishment with them ("Part 1:"). The official definition of capital punishment is "the legally authorized killing of someone as punishment for a crime"(Oxford). Throughout the years, the death penalty has evolved and has been present in most legal systems around the world. Though, as capital punishment has evolved, so has humans ' sense of what 's right and what 's wrong. These days, many people question the morality of exercising the death penalty. Over half of the country still supports the death penalty, but this is "a drop of 22 percentage points from peak support in 1996"(Kiener). This statistic shows that Americans are beginning to turn from the barbaric laws that are defined as capital punishment. Personally, I believe that the use of capital punishment should be eradicated completely from this world because it is unethical, expensive, not 100 percent accurate, and does not effectively punish the criminal.

The political issue that I choose is capital punishment. There are pretty much the same number of reasons why capital punishment should be nullified as there are reasons why we require it. It is a complex issue and it is practically impossible to point to any single argument as the most important. Overall 140 countries have now stopped using capital punishment. America 's continued use of the death penalty just profiles us as a fierce and wrathful country and keeps us in the same class as Iran, North Korea and China who still practice and advocate capital punishment.