Argumentative Essay: Death Penalty In The United States

Reginald Snow

Mr. Jeffrey Britenfeldt

WRI-1100

6 July 2015 The End of a Tradition One of the most talks about today in the United States is the death penalty. The death penalty is being sentence to death for commit a crime. The reason this is a big issue has a lot to do with misinformation. There is a lot of emotion that comes with the death penalty. But when emotion is not involved there is only one way it should be handled United States being one of the more advanced countries, why do we still practice capital punishment? Some people say it is the best option to get those criminals off the streets to prevent them from harming others. The death penalty should be outlawed because innocent people could be put to death, it does not deter crime,

There have been many people that didn’t have the chance to walk free when it is found out they there were not guilty because they were already put to death prematurely According to Ed Pilkington, a reporter for The Guardian, “the innocence of more than 200 prisoners still in the system may never be recognized” (Pilkington). That is way too much even one life is way too many. With technology advancing at the rate it is there is no telling how much that number will rise in the coming years. We as nation should stop adding to this number. According to Jim walls, an editor in chief for the sojourners, “Since 1973, 141 people have been exonerated and set free from death sentences because of new evidence—people who shouldn't have even been prisoners and were almost killed by the state due to false or faulty evidence, Eighteen of them were released because of DNA evidence “ (walls). What if even half of the people put to death were later found out to be innocent that is a scary

Starting from hangings, moving on to the electric chair, and now we have lethal injection. The reason why we have moved on to so many different styles of executions is because executions can be botched. When botch executions occur, reforms occur as well. Still I believe this to be unjust and inhumane because of these botched executions. Even with lethal injection, there still might be a chance where the person can feel pain. Seema shae stated “On July 23, 2014, an execution in Arizona lasted nearly two hours, with the inmate struggling to breathe and gasping over 600 times, according to a local reporter witnessing the execution. This was the third example of a botched execution in seven months. The Supreme Court last evaluated the constitutionality of execution by lethal injection in 2008, but did not provide a clear standard for evaluating risks. Since that time, the lethal injection landscape has transformed. States are using entirely new drugs and drug combinations, and sometimes obtain these drugs from questionable sources, making it hard to predict what will happen in any given execution” (Shah).There is still not a way to make sure everything goes to plan. This should not be how anyone last minutes of life should be.

All the evidence points to what should be an end to the death penalty. I feel if people who opposed it actually knew all the facts they would no longer oppose. The main reason people oppose; thinking it