the death penalty
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." These are words spoken but not practiced in America, or are they? The United States does not rest its punishments on this axiom. If you rape someone, you are not raped. If you rob a store, you are not robbed in return. No, you receive prison time, or something to that manner. Why is the act of murdering any different? Is killing a person really the way to teach one a lesson? A murderer, by any means, does not deserve to live in any society. But what does murdering them do? Nothing. It does not save money, it does not teach others a lesson, and has not been proven to be a deterrent."Twenty-three innocent people have been mistakenly executed this century" (Guilty 1). According to some death penalty supporters, killing prisoners is the only way to ensure that they will never commit a crime again. A state policy of executing prisoners, however, reflects several false assumptions. Unlike imprisonment, the death penalty entails the inherent risk of judicial errors, which can never be corrected. Who lives and whom dies may be decided by factors that have nothing to do with a case: errors, misunderstandings, or different interpretations of
death penalty (Amnesty 5). Also, prosecutors seek the death penalty far more frequently when the victim of the homicide is white than when they are black. In most states The death penalty is applied neither fairly nor consistently. Several thousand defendants are convicted of murder each year, and less than 1 percent of them receive the death penalty (Death 5). It is the prosecutor who decides whether or not to seek the death penalty. Some will rarely seek and some will try for it whenever possible. Some will call for capital punishment only if a case is widely publicized or an issue among defense attorneys or local police. Many will even show racial bias in their decisions to seek the Many people believe that the death penalty is a verdict that is arrived in a justified manner. Although justified verdicts are very necessary in our society, the death penalty in the United States has been marked by racism and inequality. "Nearly 90% of persons executed were convicted of killing whites, although people of color make up over half of all homicide victims in the United States" (Executing 1). Although whites and blacks are victims of murder in approximately equal numbers, since 1977 the overwhelming majority of death row defendants, 80 percent, were executed for killing whites (Death 10). Blacks convicted of killing whites are more likely than any other group of offenders to receive a death sentence. Whites have rarely been sentenced to death for killing blacks, and since the death penalty was reinstated, only 6 white persons have been executed for killing a black person. "In Illinois, Oklahoma and North Carolina killers of white people are four times more l! In 1975, only a year before the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of capital punishment, two African American men in Florida were released from prison after waiting twelve years for execution for the murder of two white men. Their convictions we
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Approximate Word count = 1307
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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