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Should Executions Be Televised Essay

743 Words3 Pages

Alex Williams
Mrs. Jones
AP American Literature
February 19

Should Executions Be Televised?

The Capital Punishment, (which is the execution of defendants in the court of law) has been in debate for some time. My debate involves whether or not the Capital Punishment should be televised to the public via Television and or Web. Since the time of Greeks, executions have been a public event, but they were solemn events, not frenzies that TV, movies, and video games portray. That solemn reaction to public executions shows that the public wouldn’t necessarily find any satisfaction in the death of prisoner but seeing the death of a person would add a shock factor in today’s society due to the closed door of the capital punishment from the American …show more content…

To justify the testing of the latest death sentencing method, lethal injection, The Department of Corrections requested the execution of Andrew Grant DeYoung, a murderer from Georgia, requested that his execution be videotaped to test to see if the new anesthetic pentobarbital which was added to lethal injection was a suffering, inhumane way to die, (Jackson). The videotaping was a success, which gave thumbs up to showing the videotape to the general public. The video-taping of DeYoung was due to the face that the first executed convict Roy Blankenship had begun to feel the pain while using pentobarbital. The taping helped the government see what needed to be done to make lethal injection lass painful, (Jackson).
Televising executions however, has proven to have some major backfires. Some reports of claimed that the person who has been watching said televised executions“… becomes inured and eventually numbed to the imagery of death, which can lead to a poorly balanced view of life and death as well as devaluing of life” (Gamble). Also in the same article it stated that publicized executions in war-torn countries have become more violent, higher uprisings and never-ending violence due to the publicized executions. And is asked what would become of us due to the

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