Jonathan Rothschild
Capital Punishment essay
Inhumanity of Capital Punishment Capital punishment is not a humane way of making a suspect suffer as worse as the victim who got killed suffered that day. It might seem that the cost of keeping someone in jail might be more than the death penalty but according to deathpenalty.org, the cost of keeping someone in jail is only a fraction of the cost of the death penalty. In California, the state spends 184 million dollars a year on the death penalty and is on track to spend 1 billion dollars over the next 5 years. Also, the death penalty doesn’t prove that people are innocent before being proved guilty because innocent people have died years before evidence was found that they were really innocent. There have been many debates
…show more content…
Having a bad lawyer can lead you to being found guilty and left to die. In some cases, a lawyer showed up under the influence of alcohol or showed up unprepared with little to none experience. This usually occurs when the suspect can’t afford a good lawyer with experience of the death penalty so they are assigned a lawyer that isn’t prepared for the job. Almost all defendants in capital punishment cases can’t afford their own attorneys. Since “almost two-thirds of the current population of juvenile offenders on death row are persons of color,” most of these suspects live under the poverty line and can’t afford a lawyer. Also the judges on death row are racially biased and during the 1980s, prosecutors in Georgia sought the death penalty for 70% of black defendants with white victims, but for only 15% of white defendants with black victims. While some people may say it’s a coincidence that more African Americans were guilty than white defendants were or that African Americans and Latinos are more prone to committing violence, people against capital punishment say that the judges are racially biased towards white people and therefore sentence African Americans more often