Capital Punishment

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Capital punishment is broken. The death penalty has been accused of being discriminative, discerning, and selective. It has been statistically proven that this system is racially biased; claims innocent lives, and disregards mental illness. Benjamin Franklin once said, “it is better that one hundred guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffers.” The following addresses the pros and cons of the death penalty, how effective it is, and why it should be implemented across the all of the United States.
The purpose of the death penalty is to punish a crime, prevent the criminal from repeating the act, and to discourage future potential criminals. Capital punishment is among the oldest forms of criminal punishments, dating back to nearly 2000 years B.C. There are four key points to the reasoning of the death penalty: Intimidation, deterrence, restitution, and retribution.
Intimidation refers to the safety of the peers in which a criminal is exposed to. An incarcerated criminal cannot harm the safety of the public but can harm the safety of fellow inmates. An executed felon cannot commit a crime ever again. The equal punishment to the death penalty is life in prison without parole. When a citizen is stripped away of their rights and told they will spend the rest of their life in a prison, there is nothing to live for, nothing to look forward to, and nothing to keep the criminal from offending the law again. Execution over incarceration guarantees that this troubled human being will never intimidate or harm a citizen, prison guard, or prison inmate.
Deterrence is a technique applied to knowledgeable people. Deterrence is targeted towards people who use logic in their daily lives. The threat of extreme punishment dete...

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...t be recruited. Five law enforcement riflemen must be used in this form of execution. Four of the five riflemen will have bullets; one rifleman will have a blank. This will ensure that the squad will not know who fired the fatal shot(s).
Since 1776 when this nation began, more people have been executed through hanging than through any other measure. A rope must be boiled and stretched before use to guarantee strength. A drop distance table, developed by the U.S Army, must be used to determine the height of a drop and length of a rope.
Yes, capital punishment is broken. Problems occur with every idea. There will never be a perfect solution for this issue or any other issue. The major issue is to not kill someone who has not harmed others. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “it is better that one hundred guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffers.”

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