Persuasive Essay On The Death Penalty

710 Words2 Pages

Throughout the years the death penalty has been a very controversial aspect when it comes to punishment. Some groups of people believe that is should be abolished and other think that America should keep it. I’m here to say that I am not for the death penalty at all. To me the death penalty has a couple of flaws that I have an issue looking past. The death penalty is very unconstitutional for anyone who is put through it and it is very bias on who it chooses for the punishment. First the death penalty is against people human right of the constitution. To me I feel that the death penalty strips people of their eighth amendment right. This amendment protects people from excessive fine and cruel punishment (Marshfield, 2016). It is crazy to think that the pilgrims fled the oppression of England, set up rights for their people, and America goes and sets up the death penalty. If we keep it up like this, before you know it we as the citizens are going to be forced to house soldiers or we …show more content…

From back in the late 1800s to the early 1900s you can see that the death penalty was set up for the punishment of African Americans. Steiker and Steiker states in their article, “Not only did the number of blacks executed surpass the number of whites executed during the eighteenth century, but blacks were often executed for different crimes” (2015, pg. 245). From this one can see that yes some white people did suffer from the death penalty back in the day, but for crimes such as murder or rape. Black people on the other hand were sent to death for crimes such as looking at a white women wrong or jay walking (Steiker and Steiker, 2015). This seems to be happening today as well. Like old times black people seem to get it the worse then white people. So why keep a punishment which was based on race and still to this day seems to not have changed (Steiker and Steiker,

Open Document