Life Is Sacred Many people are led to believe that the death penalty doesn’t occur very often and that very few people are actually killed, but in reality, it’s quite the opposite. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1,359 people have been executed as a result of being on death row since 1977 to 2013. Even though this form of punishment is extremely controversial, due to the fact that someone’s life is at stake, it somehow still stands to this very day as our ultimate form of punishment. Although capital punishment puts murderers to death, it should be abolished because killing someone who murdered another, does not and will not make the situation any better in addition to costing tax payers millions of dollars. In his essay, …show more content…
In Bryan Stevenson’s essay, “Close To Death: Reflections on Race and Capital Punishment In America” he claims that there is a tremendous racial problem in our criminal justice system. Stevenson explains, “A report by the United States General Accounting Office in 1990 concluded that 82 percent of the empirically valid studies on the subject show that the race of the victim has an impact on capital charging decisions or sentencing verdicts or both” (86). Racial discrimination has been an immense problem in our society for a very long time. The fact that the race of a victim plays a role in his or her sentencing is appalling. Discrimination within our society needs to come to an end. It’s frightening to think that if you are a minority facing a capital punishment case, which you might be found guilty only because of the color of your skin. Additionally, capital punishment is absurdly expensive. In the article, “ Capital Punishment: Deterrent Effects & Capital costs” Jeffery A. Fagan discusses how expensive death penalty cases can be. He …show more content…
There have been cases where inmates suffer greatly when injected with the deadly concoction. In the guide, “From Critical Thinking to Argument” Zachary Shemtob and David Lat described a case where an inmate showed signs that he was in agonizing pain after being injected with the mixture. Lat and Shemtob wrote, “When another Georgia inmate, Roy Blankenship, was executed in June, the prisoner jerked his head, grimaced, gasped, and lurched, according to a medical expert’s affidavit” (62). Could you imagine being a witness to that? It makes the belief that capital punishment is even more wrong than it was before. Additionally, our eighth amendment is supposed to protect us from cruel and unusual punishment. Blankenship was certainly not given that right. Our government needs to realize that the death penalty extinguishes our protection from cruel and unusual
There have been different outcomes for different racial and gender groups in sentencing and convicting criminals in the United States criminal justice system. Experts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to many of these inequalities. Minority defendants are charged with ...
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
Even the worst crimes should not be paid with the simple escape of death. The death penalty costs far more than a life sentence, though it seems like the opposite would be true. With the multiple appeals and trials and relocations, it’s millions down the drain. According to deathpenalty.org it costs taxpayers $90,000 more a year to maintain a death row prisoner versus maintaining a prisoner in general population. Add in the cost of execution depending on the method, $24 million for each electrocution in Florida, at least $86 per lethal injection, around $25,000 for a fire squad execution,(deathpenaltyinfo.org) and it’s even more for a quick end.
In conclusion, we have seen that the race of the victim and the emotionality of the victim impact statements highly affects the jury’s empathy and therefore might influence their decision making. Understanding the interaction between the racial in-group/out-group and empathy may allow defense attorneys to lead jurors for harsher punishments for out-group racial groups and more lenient punishments for in-groups by playing on juror empathy and thus putting emotions before law and reason. Consequently, in any capital punishment case, race of the victim and race of the jury, could be the difference between life and death for a defendant and therefore needs to be studied further.
Unlike popular belief, the cost of sentencing someone to death is actually more expensive than a life sentence in prison. In Washington, since the death penalty was reinstated 5 people have been put to death costing taxpayers roughly $120 million, that's roughly $24 million per case (Seattle University, 2015). A reason that people advocate strongly for the death penalty is because they believe that they should not have to pay for the costs to keep criminals fed, sheltered and imprisoned. In fact, 56% of Canadians surveyed believed that the one time cost of a lethal injection is cheaper and will allow their money to go towards something more advantageous like healthcare or education (Angus Reid). This is actually quite different from the truth, in fact is estimated that it costs $740 000 on average to put someone in prison for life. It is also estimated that it costs roughly $1.26 million to sentence someone to death (Seattle University, 2015). (There seems to be a discrepancy between how much a single case costs and how much Washington spent since the death penalty has been reinstated, but I could not find evidence to why that is). Among the reasons why the death penalty is so expensive is the fact that the time in courts is quite lengthy. Jury trials averaged 40.13 days in cases where the death penalty was being sought, but only 16.79 days
Race plays a large factor in showing how you are viewed in society. Although there is no longer slavery and separate water fountains, we can still see areas of our daily life clearly affected by race. One of these areas is the criminal justice system and that is because the color of your skin can easily yet unfairly determine if you receive the death penalty. The controversial evidence showing that race is a large contributing factor in death penalty cases shows that there needs to be a change in the system and action taken against these biases. The issue is wide spread throughout the United States and can be proven with statistics. There is a higher probability that a black on white crime will result in a death penalty verdict than black on black or white on black. Race will ultimately define the final ruling of the sentence which is evident in the racial disparities of the death penalty. The amount of blacks on death row can easily be seen considering the majority of the prison population is black or blacks that committed the same crime as a white person but got a harsher sentence. The biases and prejudices that are in our society relating to race come to light when a jury is selected to determine a death sentence. So what is the relationship between race and the death penalty? This paper is set out to prove findings of different race related sentences and why blacks are sentenced to death more for a black on white crime. Looking at the racial divide we once had in early American history and statistics from sources and data regarding the number of blacks on death row/executed, we can expose the issues with this racial dilemma.
Costs vary ranging from an additional twenty-five thousand dollars to as high as One million dollars. This is astronomical coming from a nation in debt. We either need to figure out a way that allows the people save money on putting people to death who break society 's rules then leech money away or we need to stop it all together. This would be the only logical reason to prevent the death penalty from being implemented, but as shown above there are lackluster aspects to the system. Even when a decision is made our government doesn’t take the best coarse of action when trying to follow through on the
In modern-day America the issue of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is controversial because there is substantial evidence confirming both individual and systemic biases. While there is reason to believe that there are discriminatory elements at every step of the judicial process, this treatment will investigate and attempt to elucidate such elements in two of the most critical judicial junctures, criminal apprehension and prosecution.
Humanity instructs us that we must behave with tolerance and respect towards all. Just Mercy exemplifies how that is not the case for many Americans. Critical Race Theory is a theory which focuses on the experiences of people who are minorities. It argues that people who are minorities in the United States are oppressed and, because of the state of being oppressed, creates fundamental disadvantages (Lecture 4.7). A study conducted for the case McCleskey v. Kemp revealed that when a black defendant killed a white victim, it increased the likelihood the black defendant would receive the death penalty (Stevenson, 2014). Looking at this fact through the lens of a critical race theorist, it illustrates how unconscious racism is ignored by our legal system. The actuality that, statistically, people of color have a higher chance of getting sentenced to death than white people is a blatant example of inequality. In Chapter 8, Stevenson discusses the case of multiple juveniles who were incarcerated and sentenced to death in prison. These juveniles who were sent to adult prisons, where juveniles are five times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault, show an innate inequality towards minors (Stevenson, 2014). Ian Manuel, George Stinney, and Antonio Nunez were all only fourteen-years-old when they were condemned to die in prison. Although they did commit crimes, the purpose of the juvenile justice system is to rehabilitate young offenders. Trying juveniles in adult court represents a prejudice against age, which Stevenson sought to fight by working on appeals for Manuel and Nunez (Stevenson, 2014). His humanity shines through once again, as he combats the justice system to give the adolescents another chance at life, rather than having them die in prison. The way prisoners with mental and/or physical disabilities are treated while incarcerated is also extremely
You might find yourself reading the topic of this paper and automatically shaking your head in disagreement. After all, this is the 20th century and the Jim Crow Laws are a thing of the past. These laws are something that we read about in our History books. Racial segregation and discrimination is all but a thing of the past. Right?.....................Wrong! The facts and statistics (which I will document below) are overwhelming and the crux of the matter is that racial disparities and bias are indeed found within our criminal justice system today even in the year 2014. The truth is that our U.S. criminal justice system is a very racist system.
To look closely at many of the mechanisms in American society is to observe the contradiction between constitutional equality and equality in practice. Several of these contradictions exist in the realm of racial equality. For example, Black s often get dealt an unfair hand in the criminal justice system. In The Real War on Crime, Steven Donziger explains,
Stevenson, Bryan. Close to Death: Reflections on Race and Capital Punishment in America,” In Debating the Death Penalty, ed. Hugo Bedau and Paul Cassell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 97.
Many people, including some higher educated people, tend to believe that executing someone is a lot cheaper than the alternative, which is life in prison without the possibility of parole. Indeed, this thought seems like common sense. However, extensive research has been conducted that contradicts that belief. For instance, a study conducted in Maryland, in 2008, found that the state spends roughly 1.9 million dollars more per capital case, compared to non-capital cases (Warden, 2009). But how can this be some may ask. Well, the reason capital punishment costs more than life without the possibility of parole, is because death penalty cases are longer and more expensive. Because the capital punishment is an irreversible sentence, the state, or government, is required to heighten the defendant’s due process in order to decrease the chance of the defendant being innocent (DPIC). Furthermore, not only is it more expensive for the trial phase, it is also a higher price for a state to imprison death row inmates compared to other
This, however, is not the case in today’s judicial system. Justice is not blind, as our forefathers had intended it to be. According to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, on the racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, African Americans are incarcerated in state prison at 6 times the rate of Caucasian Americans, and were sentenced to death at 5 times the rate. Furthermore, African Americans have an average sentence length of 40 months, compared to Caucasians average sentence length of 37 months. Those figures begin to widen exponentially as socioeconomic class is brought into the
When a defendant has been convicted of killing a white person, the odds that the defendant will be executed by the state are much higher. Eighty-five percent of those who have been executed since 1976 were convicted for killing a white person, while only 13% were executed for killing a black person. When will people realize that just because a person is of another race that they are more dangerous than another race? For instance, the 1972 Furman V. Georgia case abolished the death penalty for four years on the grounds that capital punishment was extensive with racial inequalities (Latzer 21). Over twenty five years later, those inequalities are higher than ever.