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The Death Penalty Should Be Abolished as a Form of Punishment.

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Running head: The death penalty

The death penalty should be abolished as a form of punishment.
Johnathon Aaron
Excelsior

The death penalty should be abolished as a form of punishment.
This paper intends to shine some light on the death penalty in order to help the reader understand what issues face the system today and what problems can be corrected. This paper achieves this by: (1) pointing out the wrongful sentencing of innocent people and the use of DNA testing in attaining their freedom; (2) emphasizing the unjustness of the Capital Punishment system due to the arbitrary, racial and geographically biased nature of the process; And also (3) It shows that the evidence backing up deterrence as a major benefit of the death penalty …show more content…

Georgia. This was a case of a poor, black, man from a southern state that was prone to issuing the death penalty. The outcome of this trial was a de facto moratorium between 1967 and 1977 where no executions were conducted in the United’s states during this time (Schmalleger, 2011).
Deterrence is exaggerated and also obtainable through other ways.
There are two possible ways to examine deterrence. First, it can be viewed the same way that most people understand it by; the Punishment of one criminal will deter multiple others from committing similar gruesome acts. This view has been brought up in a couple of study’s: the 2001 study by Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Paul Rubin at Emory University who concluded that on average one single execution results in 18 fewer murders; an earlier study was conducted by Viscusi in 1993 which pegged the average deterrence at 14. Most of the fundamental testing and deterrence hypotheses used leading up to the present were produced by Isaac Erlich between 1975 and 1977. (Erlich 1975) although a valiant attempt to survey something as complex as this topic, most of these types of data analysis are proven false due to factors such as, failure to include states that do not carry a death penalty; and that some studies have just been methodologically flawed. I

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