The Electric Chair is Fair Punishment

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Recommended: Is the United States criminal justice system fair

This topic is a very controversial one. The paper you are about to read could cause intense arguments between some groups of people. All that doesn’t matter to me because when you finish reading this, you will agree with me if you don’t already.

First off, many people consider the electric chair cruel and unusual punishment. What I don’t get is that people think this even though in order to be eligible to get sentenced to the electric chair, they have to be proven guilty of killing someone. Don’t you think that is cruel and unusual punishment? I certainly do. In my eyes, if they don’t get sentenced to the electric chair or some other form of guaranteed death (lethal injection, the gas chamber, etc.) it becomes cruel and unusual punishment on the victim’s friends and family, not physically but mentally.

Secondly, in my eyes it is one of the only fair punishments allowed by the judicial system. Personally, I think that the murderer should suffer the exact fate that their victim did. Some people might say to give the murderer life in prison. This is hardly a punishment at all. Today, due to overcrowding in prisons, a lot of prisoners don’t serve their full sentence. Would you want one of these convicts to be a murderer? I can honestly tell you, "no, I wouldn’t." Another thing about today’s prisons is that the prisoners get free meals, clothes, bed, electricity, air conditioning and heating, cable and many other luxuries that make it a comfortable place to live if you get used to the people.

My last point is that these criminals should have thought of what the consequences would be before they killed someone. If they didn’t do this or did and still killed someone, they probably aren’t intelligent enough to make any positive impact on the world or they are mentally unstable. They shouldn’t get off the hook for killing someone. You might feel that sentencing them to life in prison is punishment enough but no, not to me.

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