8th Amendment Of The Death Penalty Analysis

Imagine waking in the middle of the night and seeing a pair of eyes glaring at you as you lay in bed. In the story ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ by Edgar Allan Poe, the murderer stares at his victim while he is sleeping for seven nights in a row before he commits the murder. The narrator justifies his actions by claiming that the old man's eye was evil. It is also perceived that the narrator has a disease or mental illness. On the day of the murder, the madman went into the old man's room and threw his bed over him. Subsequently, he dismembered the body and hid it under the floorboard. When the police came to investigate a scream reported by a neighbor, the murderer tried to act calm and became very paranoid. Based on the evidence presented in the 8th Amendment of the Death Penalty, he should be sentenced to time in a mental institution because the narrator does not know right from wrong, he had no motive, and he is not well.

His intention was not to kill the old man, but to “rid myself of the eye forever...He had the eye of a vulture-- a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold” (Poe, 1843). The madman had the impression that he was doing something beneficial by getting rid of the evil eye. He thought that this justified the fact the he was going to kill the old man. This is significant because since the murderer did not know that he was doing something wrong, he should not be put to death. Executing a person for doing something that they believed was right would be cruel. A mentally ill person’s brain does not work the same way as a sane person so they should not be blamed for what they cannot