Persuasive Essay On Banning The Death Penalty

Death penalty should be banned because it goes against the amendment, innocent people can get convicted, and it gives people an easy way out. While others think that we should not ban the death penalty because a lot of american still support it, innocent people can get exonerated from it, and we should show how we feel about the crime.

The death penalty should be banned because it is unconstitutional. William Baude is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law Stephen G. Breyer, a US Supreme Court justice, has argued that “ it is ‘highly likely’ that the death penalty as a whole violates the Eighth Amendment, because it is unreliable, arbitrary, slow and rare.”(Breyer) The eighth amendment says that we don’t allow cruel and unusual punishments.

Philip Holloway, a CNN legal analyst said that “a study last year found that, at a conservative estimate, "more than 4 percent of inmates sentenced to death in the United States are probably innocent."” This means that the system for putting people on death row is not good or secure enough to be put into action because America can’t have something that is widely known to kill off the murderers of the country kill an innocent person. That innocent person had to cost the government money to be put on there and killed so the government wasted money on a person who did not do anything wrong. Holloway has said that “I have plenty of heartbreaking stories of clients who, in my opinion, were convicted of crimes they did not commit. And I am far from alone -- there have been 154 verified cases of death row exonerations since 1973.” Holloway had to witness multiple clients he dealt with who didn’t commit the crime they were accused of

Ed Koch, from the Huffington post says “Yes, innocent people have been convicted at trial, but as a result of appeals, they have been exonerated before the sentence was carried out.” Which means that it is true that innocent people do end up on the death penalty. It can also mean that they can get exonerated but that doesn’t mean that everyone has enough evidence to get exonerated. Also Philip Holloway, from CNN stated “there have been 330 exonerations based on DNA alone, with 20 of those defendants having served time on death row since the advent of DNA technology.” This shows that alot of people may have been exonerated but it also shows how many innocent people can get dragged into the death penalty. This point is weak because not all people have the resources or enough proof to be