Killing Is Never Justifies

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Killing Is Never Justified

Capital punishment, by definition, is the legal killing of an individual. Now, how someone could be killed legally when murder is universally recognized as a violent and serious crime. It is irrevocable, meaning that once an inhabitant of death row pays the ultimate price. The death penalty is corporal punishment in its most severe form and is considered to be the ultimate form of retribution for those who have committed society's most heinous crimes, including rape and murder. Ultimately, Capital punishment is wrong due to the likelihood of error, the unjust racial allocation, and the violation of constitutional rights. However, many people believe that capital punishment is morally correct and preserves human dignity.
Primarily, until human judgment is proved to be infallible, capital punishment will always carry a likelihood of error along with it. As Hugo Adam Bedau said in his writings, “Since 1900, in this country, there have been on the average of four cases per year in which an entirely innocent person was convicted of murder. Scores of these people have been sentenced to death” (Bedau 8). Considering that four completely innocent citizens had been sentenced to death, in a period of twenty years about eighty innocent people would have been wrongly sentenced to death. Human judgment and the justice system in which the United States of America is based on will never be perfect; there will always be a margin of error. Because of the infallibility of human nature, a few people each year are accused of crimes in which they did not even commit. Should innocent citizens be placed on death row and sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit? Because the justice system will never be perfect and mistakes are inevitably going to be made, capital punishment is not a just solution, especially for the innocent. Furthermore, many innocent convicts have been executed, while others have been lucky enough to prove their innocence in time.
Subsequently, according to the Atlanta Weekly newspaper,
In Georgia in 1975, Earl Charles was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. A surviving victim of the crime erroneously identified Charles as the gunman; her testimony was supported by a jail-house informant who claimed he heard Charles confess. Incontrovertible alibi evidence, showing that Charles was in Florida at the very time of the crime, eventually establishes his innocence–but not until he had spent more than three years under his death sentence.

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