Essay example on Death Penalty:
In our society, there are many cases where we have to punish the criminal so that they would learn their lesson and stop committing crimes. There are many different ways of punishing the criminals and one of them would be the death penalty. The issue of death penalty has been going on ever since the early days. Some people support the idea of death penalty for they say it is fair for one to be killed if they kill others. There are others who feel that death penalty is not fair and many innocents have been penalized for something that they did not do. The issue of death penalty is unjust and it deals with our moral issues. It is a cruel punishment and we should be able to come up with another punishment in replace of it. Prejudice is present in cases involving the death penalty. We should abolish the death penalty from society.
There are many cases of death penalty when an innocent suspect is being sentence to death. It is unfair to the innocent people and to their family to have them executed for something they did not do. If the Courts of Justice were to misjudge a person and claim them to be guilty, they cannot fix their mistake once that innocent person is killed. Executing an innocent is just as wrongful as any individual who kills a person out in public. It would also be considered murder if the jury kills an innocent, so does that mean we should also kill the jury? That is ridiculous to have everyone just killing each other, and the issue would not get any better, but more killing gets involved. Francois Robespierre, a well-known French revolutionist, once said, “Human judgments are never so certain as to permit society to kill a human being judged by other human beings….Why deprive ourselves of any chance to redeem such errors( Goldenman) ?” It is unjust for us to have humans make judgments about other humans and to decide if they should be killed or not. Often times the Courts of Justice makes errors, but we can’t allow innocent people to be sentence to death on accident, that is unfair to the innocent and they should also take killing more seriously. John Stuart Mill, a famous philosopher, states that death penalty is wrong to the innocents, and we cannot make up for all the wrongful executions, “If by an error of justice an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected; all compensation, all reparation for the wrong is impossible”(Blacks). The courts of justice cannot make such mistakes, because if they do then they are no different from people in society who make mistakes of murdering others. If the court can be excused for their wrongful convictions then the people should be given a chance also.
People should not always consider the death penalty as the main method to solve cases because at many times there are wrongful convictions. These cases should be punished with other methods rather than killing because once a person is killed, the jury cannot fix their error. The first reason for wrongful convictions comes from the wrong information that is given by the witnesses. For example, a US Army Sergeant, named Timothy Hennis was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in South Carolina in 1986. One witnessed said that he saw Hennis at the site of the murder, but the witnessed had mistaken Hennis for someone who looked like him. Some witnesses would lie to make the defendant convicted of murder. This usually happens when the actual killer is trying to shift the blame to someone else so they could get away with it. In most cases, it is rather difficult to tell who the murderer is and this decision is based on who can tell the most persuading story to police. Therefore the death penalty should not be used in most cases because it doesn’t solve the case any better, and many times leads to a more wrongful error, in blaming an innocent. Death penalty should not be used to solve cases for it just increases the number of innocents that get killed, nothing different from the murder cases in the streets.
Death penalty is considered an evil act because it is a cruel punishment. It is cruel to punish the victims with death because it tortures them. The horror of waiting to be executed is compounded by years of waiting. These death row inmates are kept in single cells where they stay for about twenty-three hours of each day at. All they do is watch to TV or read and they do not get to interact with other people. We need to be considerate of what these people are going through. If we were to put ourselves in that same situation, we would probably disagree about being executed because all humans make mistakes, and being killed should not help us learn our lesson, it just puts our lives to a waste, which does not help the problem of murders we have in this country. All we are doing is just increasing the killing, which is not a morally right thing to do. There are many difficult issues to deal with before being executed such as waiting, having to say goodbye to their family and knowing that they will soon be put to death. The most horrifying part is that they are constantly reminded of what will be done to them. Before execution, the prisoner is forced to be physically prepared. Their head will be shave in order to prevent hair catching on fire from the tremendous heat of the electrocution. It is an evil act to have any human being put into that circumstance. “In criminal justice, combining this kind of ritualism with killing is considered an aggravated for of murder. Yet this is the kind of death the state imposes on those it executes. (Black)” No human should be treated that evil, we should try to punish them in other ways that would not be considered evil. If we keep on treating people with evil behavior, this evil nature then would always be existence on this world. We are supposed to diminish evil behavior, and cruel actions, but the death penalty is just creating more of it.
There is also discrimination that exists with death penalty. In some cases, the court is prejudice against the defendant. The reasons for their prejudice may be because of their mental retardation, racial discrimination, poverty in capital cases or other undesirable traits. These characteristics can affect the way the judge and jury judges the defendant. It is unfair to the defendant if they have undesirable traits, and it gives them a higher chance of being blamed for a murder conviction. Clarence Brandley, a black school janitor, was convicted in 1981 and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a white high school girl in Conroe, Texas. He was told by the police officer that since he is black, he is to be blame for the murder. Judge Pickett stated about the case, “ The conclusion is inescapable that the investigation was not conducted to solve the crime, but to convict Brandley” (Goldenman). Prejudice in the death penalty contributed in the execution of many innocent people.
Many supporter of the death penalty argue that it will deter violent crime. Dudley Sharp stated, “The incapacitation effect saves lives – that is, that by executing murderers you prevent other from murdering, thereby, save innocent life. The evidence of this is conclusive and incontrovertible. (Sharp)” They believed that murderer would think twice before killing because they feared death. This idea is entirely false. Murderers rarely consider of the consequences before they committed the crime. If all the murderers think of the consequences before they kill, then murder rate should be lower in place that the death penalty exists. In fact the rate of murder remains the same when compare between region that has death penalty and region with no death penalty. There are no evidence to proved that the death penalty deter crime.
All criminals should be penalize in order to preserve justice. Murderers are criminal therefore they deserve to be punish for their crime but not with the death penalty. The death penalty had many flaws. Innocent people will be kill for something that they didn’t commit. The death penalty is immoral. It is a form of cruel and unusual punishment. People greatly suffer both emotionally and physically before their execution. Capital punishment is not an antidote for violent crime. We can deprived the murderers of their freedom and throw them in prison for the rest of their lives.
AdvancedWriters.com is a professional custom writing service which can provide high school, college and university students with 100% original custom written essays, research papers, term papers, dissertations, courseworks, homeworks, book reviews, book reports, projects, presentations and other assignments of top quality. More than 550 professional Ph.D. and Master’s academic writers. Feel free to order a custom written essay online on any topic, in any discipline and with any deadline you need.