Persuasive Essay Against The Death Penalty

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“Treat others how you want to be treated.” This common mantra is a favorite of mothers everywhere. These wise words are meant to encourage kindness not retaliation but retaliate is exactly what the government does in cases of murder where the death penalty is sought. Death as a punishment has been a part of the United States Criminal Justice system since the county’s beginning, for crimes ranging from treason to murder. Though these crimes are heinous and still considered grounds for execution today, they do not justify killing a person as punishment for killing. The death penalty must be abolished because it’s cases are much more costly than cases seeking an alternative sentence, there is a chance of wrongfully convicting and executing an …show more content…

There is no way to know with complete certainty that a trial involving the death penalty will have an accurate and just verdict every time. In fact a study by James S. Liebman and Jeffery Fagan at Columbia University Law School revealed that “two thirds of all capital trials contained serious errors” (Innocence). Furthermore, when the cases were tried again over 80% did not receive a death penalty sentence, and a small percentage was completely acquitted (Innocence). The reasonable alternative punishment for a convicted murderer is a lifetime sentence without the possibility of parole. This guarantees that the violent criminal is removed from society permanently, but if new evidence or technology were to arise proving their innocence the convicted person would still be alive to see the situation resolved, something that would not be possible if he had been wrongly executed. Since 1973 this has been the case 151 times (Amnesty USA). One particularly vivid case, and one of the most recent, is that of two mentally disabled brothers, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown. Both men were convicted of rape and murder in 1983 based on confessions that they later recanted saying they had been coerced. Brown was sentenced to life in prison while McCollum was sentenced to death. They were 15 and 19 years old respectively when they were tried and sentenced and 30 years later in 2014 they were exonerated in light of new DNA evidence linking a completely different man to the crime for which they had spent decades in prison (Katz and Eckholm). The possibility that all of these people could have been killed for crimes they did not commit is terrible and is evidence that this irrevocable punishment should not be an

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