The death penalty is absolutely outrageous. There is no real reason that the government should feel that it has the right to execute people. Capital punishment is murder just as much as the people being executed murdered. The is no need for the death penalty and it needs to be abolished. It goes against the Constitution which states that there will be no cruel and unusual punishment. There is nothing crueler than killing a person. A perfect example of the death penalty going awry is the state of Illinois. Former governor George Ryan has put a stay on all executions. This came as a result of finding thirteen death row inmates not guilty of their convicted crimes. Also, by staying executions, Illinois is not spending the three hundred million dollars to almost three hundred men and women to death row in the past twenty two years (Ryan 14). That is a ridiculous amount of money to send only three hundred to death row, making it approximately one million dollars a person. Those people make up only two percent of all convicted murders in Illinois (Ryan 14). This leaves ninety eight percent of killers in jail. Why are only three hundred people acceptable to kill when the other ninety eight percent are not? In New York as well, prosecutors have only sought capital punishment in twelve out of one hundred ninety eight possible cases. They have found that the penalty of life without the chance of parole works well, and have come to prefer it (Shipp). Without the philosophy of life without parole, inmates who are tried for the death penalty are tried unfairly. In the year 2000 in Illinois, eight out of ten inmates sentenced to capital punishment were minorities (Mendieta). “Minority inmates constitute 83% of those who have thus far been shown to be wrongfully convicted.” One study has shown that people who murdered white people were found more likely to be sentenced to death than people who have murdered African Americans (The Death Penalty is Wrong. Dead Wrong). “Between 1930 and 1990, 4,016 persons were executed in the United States. Of these, 2,129(or 53 percent) were black” (Bedau). But race is still not the only discrimination. “During the 1980s and aerially 1990s, only about 1 percent of all those on death row were women, even though women commit about 15 percent of all cri... ... middle of paper ... ...s even more wrong to kill those people instead of forcing them to live day after day in a tiny cell to think about, and hopefully, feel remorseful about killing. Ending the lives of these criminals is letting them have the easy way out, which is certainly not what they deserve at all. The government needs to imprison these criminals because there is always a possibility that the person convicted is not guilty and if they were killed the government could do nothing at all to console those poor families of the wrong victim. Works Cited Bedau, Hugo Adam. “The Case Against the Death Penalty.” July 1992. ACLU Free Reading Room. 14 May 2003. . Mandieta, Ana. “Death Penalty Still Unfair, Report Says.” Chicago Tribune. 31 Jan 2001. Ryan, Bill. "Abolish the Death Penalty." Chicago Tribune. 05 Jan 2001: 14. "Second Judge Rules Against Death Penalty." Christian Century. 09 Oct 2002: 15. Shipp, E.R. "Justice's Doubts Bolster Case Against Death Penalty." Daily News. 10 July 2001. Willing, Richard. "Fight Against Death Penalty Gains Ground." USA Today. 11 Feb 2002: 3a. The Death Penalty is Wrong. Dead Wrong. 01 Aug 1999. 14 May 2003 .
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.
Racial representation in death row proves that justice system consistently shows bias, primarily through crime victim treatment. Though originally the Supreme Court
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.
There are major problems with our criminal justice system. In the last one hundred years, there have been more than 75 documented cases of wrongful conviction of criminal homicide. According to a 1987 Stanford University survey, at least 23 Americans have been wrongly executed in the 20th century. For this very reason, the State of Illinois imposed a moratorium on the state?s death penalty in 2000 when it was discovered that 13 inmates on its Death Row were wrongly convicted. Anthony Porter, one of the 13, spent 15 years on Death Row and was within two days of being executed, before a group of Northwestern journalism students uncovered evidence that was used to prove his innocence.
Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System “We simply cannot say we live in a country that offers equal justice to all Americans when racial disparities plague the system by which our society imposes the ultimate punishment,” stated Senator Russ Feingold. Even though racism has always been a problem since the beginning of time, recently in the United States, there has been a rise in discrimination and violence has been directed towards the African American minority primarily from those in the white majority who believe they are more superior, especially in our criminal justice system. There are many different reasons for the ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system between the majority and the minority, but some key reasons are differential involvement, individual racism, and institutional racism to why racial disparities exist in Institutional racism is racism that is shown through government organizations and political institutions. In a report done by David Baldus in 1998, he discovered that when it comes to the death penalty, blacks are more likely sentenced to death than whites, and those who kill whites are more likely to be given the death penalty than the killing of blacks (Touré).
The United States has a long history with the death penalty. The “first recorded execution was in Jamestown in 1608” (“Death Penalty in America” 259). Since then, thirty five states have continued to use the death penalty. Now it can be considered a normal punishment and many people feel strongly about it, but maybe we should forget what we have done in the past and take a second look. The death penalty should not be used in the United States because it is too expensive, affects the poor and minorities more than others, and (even though many people think it is true) the death penalty does not deter crime.
25 Hugo Adams Bedau, The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 250.
Mappes, Thomas A., Jane S. Zembaty, and David DeGrazia. "The Death Penalty." Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy. 8th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. 105-53. Print.
Andre, Claire, and Manuel Velasquez. “Capital Punishment.” Our Duty or Our Doom. 12 May 2010. 30 May 2010 .
Prosecuting a death penalty case is extremely expensive for a state and drains money that could be used for education and social programs. Capital punishment costs more than sentencing a prisoner to life without parole. The most comprehensive death penalty study in the country found that the death penalty cost North Carolina $2.16 million more per execution, over the costs of sentencing murderers to life imprisonment. The United states economy is far from adequate and I believe these wasted dollars should be refocused towards unemployment and
The death penalty is racist, it punishes the poor, it causes the innocent to die, it is not a deterrent against violent crime, and it is cruel and unusual punishment. More than half of the countries in the world have already abolished the death penalty and the U.S should abolish it too. It is wrong and cruel. Some states in the U.S still hold the death penalty because they think it will keep U.S citizens safe, but we can just keep the murders in a separate patrolled jail. Abolish it and we may save the lives of the people that may have been executed innocent.
To this date, Seven hundred and seventy two criminals in the U.S. alone have been
“The case Against the Death Penalty.” aclu.org. American Civil Liberties Union, 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2013
The statistics say that African Americans are twelve percent of the U.S. population, but are 43 percent of the prisoners on death row. Although blacks make up 50 percent of all murder victims, 83 percent of the victims in death penalty cases are white. Since 1976, only ten executions have involved a white defendant who killed a black victim.... ... middle of paper ...
Some even claim that it is cruel and unusual punishment. I would like to shed light on the issue and inform everyone as to why we should keep the death penalty and possibly even use it more than we do now. First of all, it is hard for anyone to argue that we already use the death penalty too much because facts say that we hardly use it at all. Since 1967, there has been one execution for every 1,600 murders. There have been approximately 560,000 murders and 358 executions between 1967 and 1996(UCR and BJS).