“Although 31 of the 50 states have statutes which provide capital punishment for one or more crimes, and hundreds of prisoners remain confined in state prisons under sentence of death, only 32% of those first convicted go on to death row, and 8% of those on death row die before they are executed” (Sellin).
The Death Penalty: Who Deserves It?
The discussion of what’s morally correct is debated in courts every month, and less than half of criminals who originally receive the death penalty sentence actually go on to death row. Before there was lethal injection, however, there was the ancient ritual of stoning, which the first documented as an execution in the 1400’s. Author Richard J. Rosivach writes, “stoning has been used to execute accused criminals for centuries, but authorities did not start documenting these executions until 1489” (Rosivach). Ancient forms of execution are seen as barbaric to society now, but there was once a time when stoning was the primary procedure of execution.
The type of person who deserves the death penalty has been debated for decades, and every state has a different policy for the death penalty, but the only people who deserve it are those
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The family member who ultimately draws the unlucky paper from the box was Bill’s wife, Tessie, and, despite her cries for help, is mercily stoned to death by the whole village (Jackson). This is just one fictional instance in which harsh punishment for an innocent person was used, and there have been plenty of other instances where innocent people have been wrongfully executed for a crime they did not commit or simply for no reason at all. The act of stoning, however barbaric, should never be used on someone who did nothing wrong, and neither should the death