Death Penalty Is the One Term Paper

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Our prejudiced minds and clouded vision make us believe that all black men are criminals resulting in a twisted criminal justice system. Thomas Sancton (1991) reveals, "...blacks and Hispanics are proportionally far more likely to be sent to death chambers than whites; that poor defendants are condemned more often than rich ones; that the existence of the death penalty, despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, in fact has no deterrent value. The execution in some states of minors and retarded inmates is profoundly shocking to many people in the U.S. And abroad, as is the multiplicity of judicial errors that have sent innocent people to execution chambers or long terms on death row."

Regardless of what people have to say about death penalty, researches and unbiased studies have shown that this form of punishment doesn't serve any good purpose. It exists because society refuses to operate with compassion but revels in intense hatred of criminals. Posner (2002) shed further light on this, "The support for capital punishment is based primarily on retributive motives, or more bluntly on notions of vengeance, or simply on hatred of criminals and crime, and on the discrediting of "progressive," therapeutic approaches to crime that are associated in the public mind with the increase in the crime rate that began in the 1960s. We are not so far from the eighteenth century as we may have thought we were, when execution could be compared to "the cutting of a Wart or a Wen from the Body."

Death penalty is opposed not only because it hurts and violates a criminal's right to life and forgiveness but also because it is often used unfairly to target innocent people.

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Despite the best efforts of criminal justice system, death penalty is one form of punishment that cannot always be awarded fairly in 100% of cases. And the worst part is that once this punishment has been carried out and the 'offender' was later found not guilty of the crime, there is simply no proper way to apologize. The person cannot be brought back to life. Death penalty abolition is now supported by even some of those who were once staunchest supporters of this law. Former Supreme Court judge, Lewis Powell, is one such person. He was quoted in the Economist (1999) as saying "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored...along with the majority of this court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved...I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed." (the Economist, 1999)

Even with the evidence against death penalty and its retributive properties, America has not given up the practice. United States should not declare itself to be the champion of democracy with this form of punishment still prevalent in its criminal justice system.

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