Death Penalty In America Essay

The aim of this research paper is to argue against the use of the death penalty in America. The paper will cover several issues that concern the death penalty and these issues include the constitutionality of capital punishment, wrongly accused on death row, and feasibility. Landmark court cases and precedents will be discussed to illustrate how capital punishment has changed throughout the years and what the limits of the punishment are. Cases such as Furman v. Georgia had established that the arbitrary and inconsistent enforcement of the death penalty had violated the eight and fourteenth amendments, therefore the court had issued a moratorium on the death penalty which lasted for several years. Justices of the Furman case also held that

Georgia, Justices Marshall and Douglas had stated that discrimination had occurred in criminal cases that involved the death penalty because it had been unjustly imposed on minority groups of offenders. Following the years after 1976, a trend started to appear that showed a racial bias when it came to sentencing people for capital punishment. The trend showed that a person gets the sentence for the death penalty depends on several factors such as the race of the victim and the offender. Regarding the data, a black offender who commits a crime against a white victim is more likely to get capital punishment. Furthermore, black offenders have a higher chance of getting the death penalty than white defendants because they are sentenced at a higher rate. Another reason why the cards are stacked against African Americans and other minority groups is that their cases are decided by all-white or mostly white juries which is a commonplace in many areas. After presenting statistics and facts that highlight the faults of capital cases, government officials and politicians often state after it does not matter anymore from a legal standpoint that racial discrimination has affected sentencing for executions in the past. However, they say that “the current data are too scanty to support conclusions of continuing racial discrimination” (Zeisel, 1981, p. 4). An example of this would be how Solicitor General, Robert Bork, said in his amicus curiae regarding a study’s conclusion that there was racial discrimination involved in rape cases, but he proceeded to state that there was no proof that racial discrimination