Death penalty violates the constitutional ban against cruel and unusual punishment, and the guarantee to due process of law and equal protection under law, and thus should be prohibited in the United States. Capital punishment is an intolerable denial of civil rights and civil liberties and government should not have the power to execute people, in the name of the law or in the name of its people, especially when it does this in an arbitrary and discriminatory fashion.
Capital punishment is cruel because it dates back to times when slavery and branding were commonplace, and like those barbaric practices, executions have no place in our modern civilization. It is unusual because of all the Western industrialized democracies, the United States is the only country who considers this hideous practice as legal. It is unusual also in the sense that only a random fraction of criminals are convicted with this type of punishment. Also, Capital punishment denies individuals the right, granted by the Constitution of the United States, to due process of law, since the penalty is applied in an arbitrary manner and it is always irrevocable, depriving the
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As journalist Susan Blaustein puts it, after reacting to having witnessed an execution in Texas: "The lethal injection method … has turned dying into a still life, thereby enabling the state to kill without anyone involved feeling anything…. Any remaining glimmers of doubt – about whether the man received due process, about his guilt, about our right to take life – cause us to rationalize these deaths with such catchwords as ‘heinous,’ ‘deserved,’ ‘deterrent,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘painless.’ We have perfected the art of institutional killing to the degree that it has deadened our natural, quintessentially human response to death". The benefits of death penalty are illusory, but the dire consequences of this bloodshed to our society are very