Death Penalty and Its Effect on Crime. Term Paper

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death penalty and its effect on crime. The death penalty does not eliminate murder and it ties up our legal system because of appeals and postponements. One state is now even trying to apply the capital punishment rule to other crimes. The legal system has used the capital punishment laws as a way to control minority groups. I am against the death penalty and capital punishment.

The legal system has been very incompetent when it comes to capital punishment. "There are serious and disturbing questions about the convictions of a number of inmates facing execution, particularly in those cases that were tried years ago by unqualified lawyers lacking adequate resources," Dan Goyette said. "We should not proceed with executions until this independent evaluation is completed and we are assured that due process has been fully and properly provided in each and every case. To do otherwise would cast significant doubt on the fairness and propriety of imposing the ultimate punishment. We all have a fundamental responsibility to avoid at all costs the possibility of making an unjust and irreversible mistake." (DeathPenalty.org) There are so many people and groups that are strongly against the death penalty in the United States that our legal system has created a subculture of anti-capital punishment litigation systems.

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These groups have been very effective at postponing executions for years and in many cases, even decades.

Many states that have no death penalty actually have lower rates of homicide than do states with the death penalty. Consider Alaska which does not have a death penalty: in 2008 they only had 4.1 murders for every 100,000 citizens. In Alabama that does have death penalty; they had 7.6 murders per 100,000 citizens in the same year. One might think that this is a onetime occurrence, but since 1996 Alabama has consistently had more murders than Alaska. The threat of a capital punishment conviction is obviously not the deterrent that the legal system expects us to believe. In Louisiana, efforts to apply capital punishment rules to other than murder crimes could change the rules for our entire legal system in the future. "In a recent editorial, the Los Angeles Times voiced concerns about a Louisiana Supreme Court decision upholding the death sentence of Patrick Kennedy for the rape of his 8-year-old stepdaughter. The paper said the Louisiana court's decision to allow the death penalty in such cases could lead states to seek the death penalty for other non-murder crimes,….....

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