Punishable By Death?

A detailed Summary of Punishable By Death?


A crime that is apparently so heinous that the only conceivable punishment is death. The use of the death penalty as a deterrent to crime is as heinous as the crimes that put people on death row. The death penalty is believed to be one rooted in racism and it has continued on in that tradition. The poor are at a disadvantage when it comes to being tried for the death penalty. Lastly the sentencing of the death penalty is not always given with just cause. The penalty of death due to crime is a racist punishment that condemns the poor and innocent alike.

Racism has always been around and probably always will be. However it has no place in our court systems. It is fairly apparent that the death penalty is racist. African Americans are 12% of the U.S. population, but yet they make up 43% of prisoners on death row. Although Blacks constitute 50% of all murder victims, 83% of the victims in death penalty cases are white. Throughout the course of the history of our country, only 37 of the over 18,000 executions in this country involved a white person killing an African American person. Also a study done in Georgia found that murderers of white people are 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than ki


Considering that one could never always know if the person committed of a crime is always the one that committed it. In the last 25 years, more than 82 people have been released from prison after being sentenced to death despite their innocence. So, 1 in 7 of those on death row has been freed after being fully forgiven. It is noted in the book, In Spite of Innocence that between 1900 and 1992 there have been 416 documented cases of innocent persons who have been convicted and given a death sentence. The authors discovered that in 23 of those cases, the person wound up executed anyways. In Illinois they have released as many people from death row as it has executed since 1976. Illinois Supreme Court Justice responded to that with, "Despite the courts' efforts to fashion a death penalty scheme that is just... the system is not working. Innocent people are being sentenced to death... If this is the best our state can do, we have no business sending people to their deaths." Former President Clinton has called appeals by death-row prisoners "ridiculous" and "interminable". He passed a law that limits prisoners to a single habeas corpus appeal within one year of conviction. Under this law, many of those released from death row due to innocence since 1976 would be dead.

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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 874
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Politics

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