Death PenaltyEssay Preview: Death PenaltyReport this essayDeath penaltySince our nations founding, the government has punished murder victims and in recent years rape with the ultimate sanction death. Over 13,000 people have been legally executed since colonial times. In the 1930s there were as many as 150 people executed each year. Legal challenges caused these executions to come nearly to a halt by 1967. By 1972 in Furman v. Georgia the supreme court excused hundreds of scheduled executions, declaring that existing state laws were applied in an “Arbitrary and Capricious” manner, and violated the 8th amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, the 14th amendments guarantees of equal protection of the laws and due process. In 1976 Gregg v. Georgia the court ruled that the penalty “does not invariably violate the constitution” if applied in a manner designed to guard against arbitrariness and discrimination. As of April 1, 2006 3,370 people are on death row. Many people have different views on capital punishment. There are many different factors that contribute to the death penalty some of the good things about the death penalty are punishment by retribution, deters crime, and it gets rid of criminals. So there is no chance of them committing another crime. The two major downfalls are innocent people sometimes get sentenced and the cost.
Some reasons we have the death penalty are for deterrence which means to punish somebody as an example and to create fear in other people for the punishment. The death penalty is one of these extreme punishments that would create fear in the mind of any sane person. Most criminals would think twice if they knew their own lives were at stake. Suppose there is no death penalty in a state and life imprisonment without parole is the maximum punishment. What is stopping a prisoner who is facing a life imprisonment without parole to commit another murder in the prison when they are already facing the maximum punishment. “Capital Punishment and Social Defense” mentions, “crimes can be deterred only by making would be criminals frightened of being arrested, convicted, and punished for crimes”(301). For serial killers, death penalty should be there, so that others, who even think about commiting such crimes, learn a lesson that every criminal is eventually caught. “Capital punishment may be imposed only when guilt is determined by clear and convincing evidence leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts”. (Capital Punishment: life or death, internet). I believe that if one cannot value the life of another human being, then ones own life has no value.
Capital punishment has its downfalls. The biggest of course is the chance of innocent people being prosecuted. As of April 2005, 119 prisoners convicted of capital crimes and sentenced to death have been released from death row because of innocence due to DNA testing. Wrongful convictions often result from: false confessions, which are frequently coerced from juveniles and mentally retarded people, mistaken eyewitness evidence, jail house snitches, white coat fraud and junk science, and prosecutorial abuse. The second biggest downfall of the death penalty is the cost. The death penalty costs more than life in prison. Prosecuting a death penalty case is extremely expensive for a state and drains money that could be used for education and social programs. One study found that the death penalty costs north carolina $2.16 million more per execution than
The Sentencing Center reports that:
[A]s the number of executions is declining, prisons are holding far more men in prison, and it’s increasing as we move away from capital punishment as a way of life … so a lot of these men have been in court without conviction for more than a year because they have been convicted. It’s not just the lack of conviction that’s leading [prisoners] to do the death penalty. It’s also the way in which people feel, especially men, their pain and their suffering for life. There have been very strong, lasting, negative reactions here in the state. The number of executions has gone up by 100,000 people over the last 30 years. They have reduced their participation in the legal system, increased the rate of incarceration, more people are in prison, fewer are eligible for higher education, they are less likely to participate in the criminal justice system, more people with a family or children are released out in the community, more people with a felony conviction, more people with mental disorders are released out. I have no doubt that more people have made their choice to go to prison for the killing of their loved ones, the deaths of their friends, the deaths of their neighbors or their families, and in no wise should they be penalized for doing the killing. If people have stopped giving their death penalty case to us now, the state will take the same action they did 20 years ago. I think we have our constitutional responsibility. We owe it to the people. When they go to the courtroom when they’ve made a bad decision and we are willing to work with them to help them, and we want to take it seriously, they come here and we can’t sit back and say: Why don’t you call us? We do ask for their assistance in our legal system. In some cases, it isn’t because they’re wrong in their view on some issue, but because they have a very high tolerance for what’s wrong with it.”
According to the PSC, in 1992, there were 1.6 million inmates in the United States under death row after 20 states abolished their laws prohibiting the death penalty.
As an example, in 1996-97, the state of Texas eliminated the death penalty. While the state has a history of using and increasing capital punishment with bipartisan support, there are still very few laws authorizing the death penalty on the books.
As the PSC notes,
With less than a week to go until the end of the 2012 elections, only 1 out of 9 Republican-dominated statehouses lost the Senate in that session, and those with majority support gained two in four of those losses. The loss of one senate seat with the exception of this one suggests in its aftermath the state has fallen back on the die. While the Legislature may have voted ‘no’ in the current special session after the law was passed, Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin’s margin of victory is only 14-16 with about 10 percent of the vote. The numbers are telling—when you consider more than one-third of Republicans said they wanted to end the death penalty with legislation, Durbins beat Durbin by less than 1 points.
In a press release, PSC’s Bill Bishop says of these findings:
This study does not attempt to determine whether it is feasible to eliminate the penalty from California’s Penal Code, but rather, if such a law were adopted
The Sentencing Center reports that:
[A]s the number of executions is declining, prisons are holding far more men in prison, and it’s increasing as we move away from capital punishment as a way of life … so a lot of these men have been in court without conviction for more than a year because they have been convicted. It’s not just the lack of conviction that’s leading [prisoners] to do the death penalty. It’s also the way in which people feel, especially men, their pain and their suffering for life. There have been very strong, lasting, negative reactions here in the state. The number of executions has gone up by 100,000 people over the last 30 years. They have reduced their participation in the legal system, increased the rate of incarceration, more people are in prison, fewer are eligible for higher education, they are less likely to participate in the criminal justice system, more people with a family or children are released out in the community, more people with a felony conviction, more people with mental disorders are released out. I have no doubt that more people have made their choice to go to prison for the killing of their loved ones, the deaths of their friends, the deaths of their neighbors or their families, and in no wise should they be penalized for doing the killing. If people have stopped giving their death penalty case to us now, the state will take the same action they did 20 years ago. I think we have our constitutional responsibility. We owe it to the people. When they go to the courtroom when they’ve made a bad decision and we are willing to work with them to help them, and we want to take it seriously, they come here and we can’t sit back and say: Why don’t you call us? We do ask for their assistance in our legal system. In some cases, it isn’t because they’re wrong in their view on some issue, but because they have a very high tolerance for what’s wrong with it.”
According to the PSC, in 1992, there were 1.6 million inmates in the United States under death row after 20 states abolished their laws prohibiting the death penalty.
As an example, in 1996-97, the state of Texas eliminated the death penalty. While the state has a history of using and increasing capital punishment with bipartisan support, there are still very few laws authorizing the death penalty on the books.
As the PSC notes,
With less than a week to go until the end of the 2012 elections, only 1 out of 9 Republican-dominated statehouses lost the Senate in that session, and those with majority support gained two in four of those losses. The loss of one senate seat with the exception of this one suggests in its aftermath the state has fallen back on the die. While the Legislature may have voted ‘no’ in the current special session after the law was passed, Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin’s margin of victory is only 14-16 with about 10 percent of the vote. The numbers are telling—when you consider more than one-third of Republicans said they wanted to end the death penalty with legislation, Durbins beat Durbin by less than 1 points.
In a press release, PSC’s Bill Bishop says of these findings:
This study does not attempt to determine whether it is feasible to eliminate the penalty from California’s Penal Code, but rather, if such a law were adopted