The instruction for a defendant to be allowed the right to a fair trial before a decision is made whether or not the death penalty should be imposed protects the defendant from being ‘arbitrarily deprived’ of life and commands that the death penalty must not be imposed when the Covenant is otherwise breached (Unknown, 1976; Joseph, Castan and Schultz, 2000). A fair trial includes, being informed of the charges; presumption of innocence; translation services provided; the right to legal representation of one’s choosing; a trial to be held without undue delay however, sufficient time to prepare a defense must be given; for the hearing to be heard by an independent and impartial tribunal; and for the right of review by a higher tribunal (Langbert, …show more content…
138). However, state appointed attorneys are often extremely overworked, underpaid and lacking the trial experience required for death penalty cases. In extreme cases, there has been instances where appointed attorneys have slept through parts of the trial, or arrived at the court under the influence of alcohol (Ibid, 1988; Death Penalty Info, n.d.; Joy and McMunigal, 2012); this breaches the accused 's constitutional right to effective counsel as well as violating the provision in the ICCPR which allows the defendant the right to a fair trial (Ibid, 1988). In support of this, in 2001, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated: "People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty […] I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial” (Death Penalty Info,
Capital punishment and bias in sentencing is among many issue minorities faced for many years in the better part of the nineteen hundreds. Now it continues to spill into the twenty first century due to the erroneous issues our criminal justice system has caused many people to suffer. In the book Just Mercy authored by Bryan Stevenson, Stevenson explains many cases of injustice. Stevenson goes into details of numerous cases of wrongfully accused people, thirteen and fourteen year olds being sentenced to death and sentences of life without parole for children. These issues Stevenson raises bring to question whether the death penalty is as viable as it should be. It brings to light the many issues our criminal justice system has today. There
What many American do not realize is that the concept of peremptory challenges has been around since the Roman era, but controversy over the topic in America did not come about until the twentieth century (Henley 1). Under Roman law, each litigant was allowed to select 100 jurors and then strike as many as 50 people from the jury pool (1). English Common law allowed the defendant 35 peremptory challenges, while the prosecution had an unlimited amount (1). This system was alive in England until 1305 when Parliament outlawed the prosecution’s right to peremptory challenges (1). It took over 600 years for Parliament to do the same with the rights to challenges for defendants in 1988 (1). The American legal system, being based on British common law, has always allowed for the use of peremptory challenges. One reasoning behind this fact is the American tradition of challenges (6). To be exact, the reason we continue to use peremptory challenges ...
In order to defend my standing in this argument I will reason that the use of capital punishment has many benefits that trump any possible objections. Special attention will be given to the topics of deterrence, the families of the victims, and the increased population that has been occurring within our prisons. Any possible objections will also be assessed including criticism regarding the monetary value of the use of the death penalty and opposition to this practice due to its characteristics, which some identify as hypocritical and inhumane. My goal in arguing for the moral justifiability of capital punishment is not to use this practice extensively but rather to reduce the use to a minimum and use it only when necessary.
The criminal trial process is able to reflect the moral and ethical standards of society to a great extent. For the law to be effective, the criminal trial process must reflect what is accepted by society to be a breach of moral and ethical conduct and the extent to which protections are granted to the victims, the offenders and the community. For these reasons, the criminal trial process is effectively able to achieve this in the areas of the adversary system, the system of appeals, legal aid and the jury system.
The death penalty should be legal. If it were there would be millions of murderers that wouldn’t be in the world anymore and everybody would be scared to kill again. Prisons are being over populated because we are letting Murderers live when they should be executed. Murderers should be killed all they do is cause problems. If they aren’t going to contribute to society in any way and they just kill people they aren’t useful.
The right to a trial by jury is a tradition that goes right to the
...ald J. “Reports: Ineffective Assistance of Counsel and Lack of Due Process in Death Penalty Cases.” Human Rights Winter 1995.
The death penalty is the lawful killing of a human being after a trial by
Have you ever thought about if the person next to you is a killer or a rapist? If he is, what would you want from the government if he had killed someone you know? He should receive the death penalty! Murderers and rapists should be punished for the crimes they have committed and should pay the price for their wrongdoing. Having the death penalty in our society is humane; it helps the overcrowding problem and gives relief to the families of the victims, who had to go through an event such as murder.
Great effort has been made in our criminal justice system in pretrial, trial, appeals, writ and clemency procedures to minimize the chance of and innocent person being convicted and sentenced to death. Since 1973, legal protections have been so great that 37 percent of all death row cases have been overturned for due process reasons or commuted. Inmates are six times more likely to get off death row by appeals than by execution.
The Death Penalty, Human Rights and British Law Lords: Judicial Opinion on Delay of Execution in the Commonwealth Caribbean.Full Text Available By: Ghany, Hamid A.. International Journal of Human Rights, Summer2000, Vol. 4 Issue 2, p30, 14p
The death penalty honors human dignity by treating the defendant as a moral able to control his/her own destiny for good or bad behavior. I believe it is an asset to society. The death penalty should not be abolished because it will reduce crime rate, it will save us and the government money, and It helps our society.
Capital punishment has been a controversial topic in association to any person condemned to a serious committed crime. Capital punishment has been a historical punishment for any cruel crime. Issues associated to things such as the different methods used for execution in most states, waste of taxpayers’ money by performing execution, and how it does not serve as any form of justice have been a big argument that raise many eyebrows. Capital punishment is still an active form of deterrence in the United States. The history of the death penalty explains the different statistics about capital punishment and provides credible information as to why the form of punishment should be abolished by every state. It is believed
Our society is like a bed of flowers; when a harmful weed sprouts we eliminate it before it harms the rest. Criminals are the weeds, and if they are not taken care of, they will only grow in numbers and consume the rest of us. The death penalty has been a popular issue for many years. Thirty three states currently support the death penalty verses seventeen that do not (Death Penalty Information Center). There is a great deal of opposition towards capital punishment, and the most popular opposing arguments are that Capital punishment is unconstitutional, it is biased towards race and class, and many innocent people are wrongfully executed due to mistakes in the system. These arguments are false, and are cleverly constructed with the help of logical fallacy’s and rhetoric. Capital punishment should be adopted by all fifty states because it discourages crime, and is a great representation of justice, and a moral punishment.
Why are people so quick to agree on ending a human being’s life? Have people ever thought of that could have been them being sentenced to death? Death penalty is a death sentence that a person receives when convicted of a capital crime and is punished with execution. Some who have been found guilty and received the death penalty but insist on their innocence are denied their legal rights. They are not allowed to give the person a statement at their trial, they are even denied victim services because they are “pro-defendant,” and they are removed from the courtroom during trials. The death penalty has brought so much controversy and misery people are going back and forth arguing whether or not the death penalty should be abolished,