Capital Punishment is a controversial topic discussed in today's society. There is a heated debate on whether states should be able to kill other humans or not. People that are in favor of the death penalty say that it saves money by not paying for housing in a maximum prison. Those opposed say that it is against the constitution, and is cruel and unusual punishment for humans to be put to his or her death. I believe that the death penalty is against the constitution and is cruel and unusual punishment. The death penalty is cruel because you cannot punish anyone worse than by killing them. It is an unusual punishment because it does not happen very often an it should not happen at all. Therefore, I think that capital punishment should be abolished.

Capital punishment is the death penalty, and has been legal in most states for many years. The death penalty did not begin reporting executions until 1930, although legal executions have been preformed before then. From 1930 to 1992, there have been 4,002 executions in the United States (Foster, Jacobs, Siegel 54). From around the 1930s to the 1960s there was a steep drop in the total numbers of executions in the US until the mid

Haines, Herbert H. Against Capital Punishment. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Burns, Robert E. "Pull the plug on the death penalty." US Catholic 63.8 (1998): 2.

America's laws are based on the Constitution. They are considered to be justifiable and what should be right; and are supposed to be the foreground for future laws. It is unconstitutional, though, for an American to be sentenced to his or her death. The eighth amendment states that "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" (US Constitution). It would be against the Constitution for an American to be put to death because it can be considered cruel and unusual punishment. The death penalty is cruel because you cannot punish anyone worse than by killing them. It is an unusual punishment because it does not happen very often. It is also stated in the Constitution under the fifth and fourteenth amendments: "[No person shall be] deprived of life, liberty, or property" (US Constitution). Once a criminal is put in jail, his or her liberty and property is taken away. However, when a murderer is put to death, then his or her life is taken away along with his or her liberty and property. It is unjust to violate the constitution in such a way.

Foster, Carol D., Nancy R. Jacobs, Mark A. Siegel. Capital Punishment. Texas: Informantion Plus, 1992.

Hood, Roger. The Death Penalty. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1996.

There are many times that once a death row inmate is executed, evidence proves his or her conviction to be false. Haines quotes Senator Rudy Boschwitz saying that "This is an even more terrifying thought because the execution is not reversible" (93). No matter what procedures are being used, there are bound to be mistakes in the rulings of the innocent, but they will still be sentenced to die. The people who sentence a person to the death penalty are a jury of humans. It is possible that humans are going to make mistakes. If a mistake is made, such as wrongful accusing, what has been done cannot be undone. It is then that those criminals who murder a person can be considered victims themselves. Americans cannot escape the fact that the judicial system is run by human beings and is susceptible to errors. Since the judicial system is not perfect, the death penalty should be abolished completely so that there is no possibility of errors to be made.

McAdams, John. "Yes: can the death penalty be administered fairly?" Spectrum: the Journal of State Government 71.1 (1998): 28-30.

The death penalty is also an unfair act of racism. There are currently "48 percent of the death row population in our country to be black [and that] is clearly practicing genocide when you consider that Afro-Americans are only 12 percent of the population" (McAdams 1). If Afro-Americans are only 12% of the population, then how come the 48% of death row inmates are Afro-American? Of the 48 percent Afro-Americans on death row, 54 percent of their victims were Anglo-Saxons, which is greater than the majority of killings. This suggests that almost half of the murderers on death row were convicted from blacks killing whites. Since there are more blacks that kill whites, that shows that the sentencing is unfair and racial.

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Approximate Word count = 2366
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)