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Pros And Cons Of The Death Penalty

594 Words3 Pages

The death penalty is quite a controversial issue. Should you kill someone because someone killed someone else? Does a wrong and a wrong make a right? It is it a fair way to punish murderers? Well, in my opinion, it isn’t. The death penalty is racially biased, ignores and neglects the mentally ill, and is not even a deterrent, all reasons to get rid of it. Capital punishment has been in the United States from the birth of the country to 1972, and from 1976 to the present. The United States is the only Western country that uses the death penalty. As of 2010, 33% of murderers get the Death Penalty. 19 States don’t use the death penalty. That fact, brings me to my first argument. First, the death penalty does not even prevent people from commiting …show more content…

Unfortunately, that’s not true. In fact, in the case of capital punishment, it’s racially biased. Since 1977, 77% of people on Death Row have been killed for killing white people, despite the fact that people of color make up 50% of homicide victims. Not only that, but obvious racism is seen quite often in courthouses. The following quote was a by a trial judge in the case Peek v. State: “Since the (n-word) mom and dad are here anyway, why don't we go ahead and do the penalty phase today instead of having to subpoena them back at cost to the state." …show more content…

“Using conservative rough projections, the Commission estimates the annual costs of the present system ($137 million per year), the present system after implementation of the reforms … ($232.7 million per year) … and a system which imposes a maximum penalty of lifetime incarceration instead of the death penalty ($11.5 million).” ( California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, July 1, 2008 - https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost/ ) The money the Government is using is coming from our tax money. It’s no different in Washington. “Washington has carried out five executions since reinstatement, implying a cost of $24 million per execution.” ( https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/WashingtonCosts.pdf ) Some people in support of the death penalty state that if you take a life, your life deserves to be taken. No one's life deserves to be taken, no matter what crimes they committed. It’s in the Constitution. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ——” The right to Life. No matter what someone did, we can’t take that away. They are “unalienable”

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Research Paper: Capital Punishment Capital punishment is one of the most controversial and talked-about topics in the United States today. It is an issue that is not explicitly mentioned in our constitution, so states have been left to interpret the law. As of April 2017, 32 states in the US legally allow the death penalty. Of the 18 states that have banned it, the most recent was Maryland in 2013. The topic is so controversial that the Supreme Court has gotten involved many times, deciding on more cases that have to do with capital punishment than most other subjects.

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891 Words | 4 Pages

In a certain point of view you see as you look at it innocent people die from death penalty, capital punishment itself is essentially showing what they don’t want people to do, and the amount of money used towards it is just too much. In addition to, it just goes against the U.S Constitution;

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It's been shown that jurors in Washington are three times more likely to sentence a black defendant to the death penalty than a white defendant in a comparable case. As of October 2002, 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black. Compared that with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims. Studies show that in Louisiana, the odds of the death penalty are 97% higher for those whose victim was white than for those whose victim was black.   As if that is not enough, a study in North Carolina has proven that the likeliness of receiving the death penalty rose by three and a half times for those defendants whose victims were white.

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1120 Words | 5 Pages

Statically, “56% of death row inmates are black or Hispanic. However, although racial minorities comprise half of all murder victims nationwide, a far greater proportion (77%) of the victims in capital convictions were white” (the guardian). Likewise, many of the jury’s of which sentence minorities have been statistically white. This leads to the claim that a racially biased system exists in which the courts perpetrate minorities as more deserving of death then their white counterparts (ncadp.org).

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968 Words | 4 Pages

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