Anna Phillips
5/10/17
Research Paper
Death Penalty and Lynchings The alarming increase in state executions is a cause for concern, especially in a society that values equality of all before the law. Executions are an inhumane and potentially unjust method of punishing criminals, much like lynchings were in the past. It does little to dissuade people from committing crimes and does nothing to bring restitution to those who have been the victims of crimes. Worst of all, executions carry with them a finality that should only be undertaken with the up most of certainty of a person’s guilt. Many of those on death row wouldn’t have been executed had they had the DNA evidence and other new advanced tools to help prove their innocence. Several people were proven innocent after it was too late. The courts, during a disheartening time in American history, were failing African-American
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At least 1,634 people were executed in 2015. That is a 50% increase since 2014. In 2015, four countries – Fiji, Madagascar, the Republic of Congo and Suriname – abolished the death penalty. One hundred and forty countries have abolished the death penalty completely. Many countries abolished the death penalty due to the fact that it is dehumanizing. In Blue Front written by Martha Collins, she looks back at lynchings and what was done to those victims. “Often they cut off parts for souvenirs. The time they cut out the heart they sliced it up. Sometimes they cut off fingers they cut off toes. They cut off other parts to cut them off. Often they made the victims eat those parts.” (Collins. Page 59) Kicking, cutting of limbs, spitting on, and dismembering the body of these people who's only crime was the color of their skin, was the town peoples way of belittling them. Treating anybody in this repulsive manner is treating them as if they were
Southern Horrors Lynch Law in All Its Phases Book Review Da B. Wells-Barnett has written the book under review. The book has been divided into six chapters that cover the various themes that author intended to fulfill. The book is mainly about the Afro-Americans and how they were treated within the American society in the late 1800s. The first chapter of the book is “the offense” band this is the chapter that explains the issues that have been able to make the Afro-American community to be treated in a bad way by the whites in the United States in the late 1800s.
The murder of seven Texas servant girls occurred throughout the year of 1885. The first murder occurred on New Year’s Eve when a twenty-five-year-old woman was brutally ripped from her bed and dragged outside. A bloody axe, a trail of blood, and a dead body with a gaping wound on her head were found at the scene. This was the first murder to occur, after five months there was a similar murder that occurs May 8th,1885; a woman was found dead in her bedroom with a gaping wound over her right eye. Then, not even two weeks later, another woman was found murdered from multiple stab wounds and appeared to have been scalped.
The strengths of this article, looks at the systemic abuse of executed Black ladies from the soonest times of American history. The steadiest consider Black female executions all through U.S. history is criminal equity experts ' executions of Black ladies to a great extent for testing gendered and bigot misuse. Provincial and prior to the war bondage regulated the abuse of slave ladies, who regularly struck back against severe fierceness by murdering White bosses. White lynch crowds viably expanded the legitimate murdering of Black ladies in postbellum society and brought down Black female execution rates. Decreased to a peonage state in the politically-sanctioned racial segregation of Jim Crow, Black ladies ' violations of resistance against White mercilessness paralleled those of slave ladies’ decades prior.
Gaines desensitizes readers to murder to expose racial tensions in the South through the murder of Beau Boutan. The racial tensions continue to grow and be expressed throughout the day by a number of African Americans, because “The catalytic event is the murder of an abusive Cajun” (Sullivan 1640). Beau’s murder shows that racial conflicts were so bad even people who were not involved in his murder wanted to stand up to the Cajuns. The African Americans come together to take a stand for what they believe in “the murder of a son of a prominent Cajun in the black quarters precipitates their stand.” (Davis, 259-260).
In 1931, the world witnessed one of the most famous legal lynchings in the Scottsboro Trial. (1931-37). Therefore, this paper identifies and critically discusses the symbolic issues that engaged the public’s sense, the morality and/or the imagination. This will help in better understanding the reasons for lynching’s popularity throughout history. This paper will contend that this verdict was predetermined by an ideology of white supremacy exemplified by racial, gendered, political and sexual stereotypes.
In the five years going before the war, swarms every now and again searched out presumed slave dissidents and white abolitionists. The most genuine flare-up of this sort happened in North Texas in 1860, when bits of gossip about a slave revolt prompted the lynching of an expected 30 to 50 slaves and perhaps more than 20 whites. The worries of the Common War, for example, bigotry, provincial loyalties, political factionalism, financial pressure, and the development of the cancellation development, injured individuals to savagery in a way that appeared to make lynching progressively simple to mull over. War-created strains delivered the best mass lynching ever, the Incomparable Hanging at Gainesville, when vigilantes hanged 41 suspected Unionists amid a 13 day time span in October
Very few whites showed any emotion or horror to these spectacles of violence. It was common to see white families with children gawking and cheering at the hanging and charred bodies. Mark Twain once said that about every white Southerner celebrated mob violence. Lynching was a crude and brutal tool used for white supremacy, used by many lynch mobs (Fitzhugh Brundage,4). Some tortures included cutting off of the fingers, toes, ears, and genitals which would be sold to the crowd as souvenirs (Robert L Zangrando, 1).
Support for life without parole sentences has increased, and the number of death sentences in the U.S. has plummeted by 50 percent in recent years. International concerns about the death penalty would probably never be enough alone to make the U.S. abandon this practice. However, because international concerns are generally being given more recognition in the U.S., and because the opinion of those other countries is more unified than ever before, it is likely that the death penalty will come under
Lynching was an unjustly practice that became common in the South. It was an extrajudicial punishment led by a mob in order to publicly execute those with alleged crimes. For example, in 1894, 197 people were murdered by mobs who did not allow their victims to make a lawful defense. In correlation to the evidence presented by Wells, the textbook indicates how law enforcement would make no effort to prevent these crimes from occurring in the first place. In contrast, not only was this "awful barbarism ignored," but these officers of the law also took part in the cruel acts by enabling the lynching.
Prominent community members frequently encouraged and even participated in lynch mobs,” the resentment of African Americans were .The lynching mobs would cut off body parts of the victim’s body, the dismembered parts would either be kept or sold as souvenirs. During this time, many black men were accused of raping white females, so as punishment they would be lynched. The lynching of the black rapist would be considered a civil action. The lynching of black bodies has left many African Americans mental scarred since they have to fear for the lives of their families and themselves.
The excerpt from the 1954 article The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi by William Bradford Huie exposes another tragic layer of American history. It is sickening to recognize that such extreme displays of hatred can exist in our world. A fourteen-year-old child, under no circumstances, deserves to be tortured and murdered. The fact that this murder was committed primarily because of Emmet Till’s background is even more horrifying. Obviously, if he were white, the events would never have transpired.
Tom, the mixed sheriff’s son in Chestnutt’s, is jailed for accusations of murdering a white man. Outraged by the death of their friend, the townspeople of Branson wanted to see Tom lynched for the murder. “The crowd decided to lynch the Negro. . . .They had some vague notions of the majesty of the law and the rights of the citizen, but in the passion of the moment these sunk into oblivion; a what man had been killed by a Negro.” ( Chestnutt 3).
In a lynching, a mob of Klansmen and their supporters carry out a murder on an African American, usually in the form of a hanging (4). The mob would then leave the body out for a public display as a warning sign to others (6). If the victim was a women, sexual assault and rape were not uncommon nor were they out of the question (4). The most common reason for a lynching was that a black male had sought sexual relations with a white woman in some form (6). The Klan would carry out lynching's under the predication that they were protecting the community
Lynching from the Negro’s Point of View”, exposes the misconceptions of lynching while contrasting how both the South and the North played a role in
Death Penalty According to the 2010 Gallup Poll, 64% of the United State of America are supporting the death penalty, I as an American am part of that 36% that is against it. I do not believe that we as human being should determine whether another person should live or die. A second reason that I am against the death penalty is for the reason that the accused person could be innocent and normally the accused person only has one court presentation and is only judged by the judge not a jury of their peer, and is sent to death row where they pay for a crime that they haven’t done. My final reason that i do not believe that the death penalty should count as a punishment for the American people is because, a person that has done a massive massacre shouldn’t just be able to leave the world just like that without paying and suffering for what they have done, Or should the death punishment continue as it is for it has a great benefit to us as citizens of the United States.