Argumentative Essay Pro Death Penalty

The death penalty is a controversial punishment still practiced in many countries around the world, one of these countries being the United States. This particular punishment can be carried out in many different ways such as hanging, firing squad and even gas chamber, but the most popular being injection of a concoction of different chemicals. The legalized killing can cause many issues among many different people and things. Capital punishment costs more to taxpayers, causes injustices among races and can kill a mentally ill person. Almost everybody knows that death row prisoners spend a lot of time in jail before their execution if they’re even executed. On average in 2011, inmates on death row spent 16 ½ years waiting for their execution

Unfortunately, this occurs in a lot of capital punishment cases for people of color. For example, in the state of Washington, almost identical cases were presented to a set a jurors. The black defendant was 3x more likely to be sentenced to death than the white defendant (“Facts about the Death Penalty”). Another example of the racial inequality in the judicial system is the fact that over 75% of the murder victims in cases resulting in an execution were white even though only 50% of murder victims are white (“Facts About the Death Penalty”). Also, in 2011, almost 83% of white homicide victims were killed by a white offender (“Facts About the Death Penalty”). These statistics shows that when white people are killed, the defendant almost always gets sentenced to death. This shows that the judicial system seems to value white lives over people of color’s lives. Also shown, currently, only 42.51% of death row is composed of white people (“Capital Punishment, 2013-Statistical Tables”), even though from 1980-2008, white people committed a little over 50% of homicides (“Capital Punishment, 2013-Statistical Tables”). Why is there only about 43% of white people on death row when half of the murders committed are from white people? These statistics show the corruption and the racial inequality in the judicial system that sentences these

Mental illness is defined as “a term that describes a broad range of mental and emotional conditions. Mental illness also refers to one portion of the broader ADA term mental impairment, and is different from other covered mental impairments such as mental retardation, organic brain damage, and learning disabilities. The term ‘psychiatric disability’ is used when mental illness significantly interferes with the performance of major life activities, such as learning, working and communicating, among others” (“Mental Illness”). On death row, more than 100 people executed from 1977-now, were mentally ill (“Facts about the Death Penalty”). Mental illness can prohibit certain brain functions from doing their rightful job. An example of an illness that affects your reasoning is schizophrenia. Schizophrenia can cause hallucinations, incoherent speech, social withdrawal and abnormal reasoning (“5 Types of Mental Illness and Disability”) Those who suffer from this disease can do things they normally wouldn’t do. It is totally awful that people with a disease they cannot control get punished for it. Mental illness is not something you can just turn on and turn off whenever you would like. Instead of spending money to help these people, we are spending money on murdering them. Mental illness can cause the defendant to not realize the full extent of the crime and/or the punishment. In the case of Edward Earl