The perpetrator is a 30-year-old man who once lived on my former block in the Bronx. He was a drug dealer and had already been arrested once during his teens. My father, XXXX, was the most moralistic man I knew; he never took a cent from anyone. Every single person who ever met him loved him and no one ever had a complaint about him. On XXXX, my mother and I were leaving the apartment we had lived in for a couple years to move into a new house. Around 9 a.m., my mother asked my father to run to the nearby dollar store to buy duct tape for the remaining boxes. Since it was a Saturday, most people were sleeping and the streets were clear. My father was a 59-year-old diabetic whose condition had worsened that year; his feet were very frail and …show more content…
From what I have seen on our building’s security tape, my father tried to the best of his ability to “run” up the stairs with his frail feet to our 3rd floor apartment. The perpetrator and his friend caught up to him on the 2nd floor and continuously beat my father on the head with a metal rod. My mother could hear my father’s screams from the 3rd floor and immediately ran out to see the two men fleeing the crime with just 15 dollars and my unconscious father on the floor. My father finally died on November X, XXXX, but to this day my mother is scarred from finding his body. The perpetrator was arrested on XXX, XXXX. Detective John Smith informed my family that the perpetrator was originally looking at a life sentence but he managed to reduce it to 20 years by both accepting a plea bargain and revealing the identity of his …show more content…
I do not think that plea bargains should be offered to criminals guilty of a first-degree murder. My father’s murder was terrible in so many ways. My mother still hasn’t mentally recovered since that day; his siblings and relatives are still emotionally scarred from that event, and most importantly my father was gone. The perpetrator pushed my father down a flight of stairs and beat his head with a metal pipe several times as my father was pleading for him to stop. The perpetrator did not deserve a reduced sentence. A man’s life is not worth a “reduced” 20-year sentence. Plea bargains are merely a convenience for the criminal justice system to prevent overcrowding. The punishment should always fit the crime. In the situation I’ve witnessed, the punishment did not fit the crime. The perpetrator had been a drug dealer for over 11 years and he had attacked other innocent people for money. The perpetrator was irrefutably guilty; he had been caught murdering a man on a security camera. When I heard that he had been allowed a plea bargain on the terms that he would plead “guilty,” I lost faith in our system. I do not believe that first-degree murderers should be allowed plea-bargains just to prevent