Capitol Punishment Essay, Research Paper

CAPITOL PUNSIHMENT

We all know that capital punishment is for the scum of the earth, all the no hopers and drug dealers, the Mafia and usually non-whites fall into this category. They deserve to be treated like this as they abuse the right of responsibility and are a disgrace to mankind. Many people do take this attitude, however racist and bias it may be, towards using capital punishment for punishing the dreadful crimes of the world. They agree that taking a life for a life is an appropriate view to take with this topic. In this essay I shall look at the different views towards the use of capital punishment as an alternative to a life prison sentence.

Capital punishment is the legal infliction of the death penalty in modern law. Also known as corporal punishment in its most severe form. In the U.S. the death penalty is authorised in five ways, these being, Hanging, Electrocution, the Gas Chamber, Firing Squad and by Lethal Injection. Hanging or firing squad is the preferred methods of execution. The earliest known use of the death penalty. It was mentioned in the code of Hammurabi in (1750 B.C.).

The efforts to abolish the death penalty took grip and started to take effect in the late eighteenth century. In America and England the Quakers led this reform. In Europe a short treatise on crime and punishment (1764) by an Italian jurist inspired influential thinkers such as Voltaire to oppose the death penalty. Some states and countries of the world have abolished it entirely. But some places do still use it as a form of punishment.

The first point for the use of capital punishment is that some will say that it puts people off committing the most serious crimes. Seeing people punished in this way will make them think twice about the way that they settle an argument. But however research has been carried out in the U.S. that states with the death penalty have more homicides than neighboring states that don” use it which proves that the point saying it will put people off crime is false if anything it attracts it.

A reason to oppose the death penalty would be that you couldn’t undo it. Say if a miscarriage of justice has been carried out they would have killed/slaughtered an innocent person. They might sentence another person to death but how do they know it was them. It would be like a mass murder. This would rarely happen as the standards of investigation and policing in the 20th Century are excellent and they would sentence anyone unless they are absolutely sure.

An opposing point to the death penalty is that it is inhuman, cruel, ghastly and obscene. It might be a bad influence to the younger generation, them growing up seeing people executed in these horrible, severe ways. The opposition to this would be that it gives a ‘Do as you would be done by’, moral. This is stated in the Bible in Genesis 9:6 it states “Whosoever sheds a man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed”, this has usually been interpreted as a divine warrant for putting people to death.

There must be and are alternatives to the death penalty. For instance, a life jail sentence would be equally as good. Why kill people in this cruel inhuman manner when other methods are equally as good. But opposing this people say that if people go to jail they can be released before they should with good behaviour and so possibly they could offend again and commit another crime. At least with the death penalty there is no chance of them doing anything like that again.

One of the most stressed and most important points of the objection to the death penalty is that many people are bias towards one person more than another, it is also used unfairly as people that are represented unfairly in the way that maybe they couldn’t afford a good lawyer, if they are innocent if the other side is stronger than you, you will most probably get sentenced.

Another type of bias is that it is sexist. Women rarely get sentenced to death although they have committed more than 20% of all homicides in recent years. Maybe because women don’t fall into the stereotypical view of a murderer described in paragraph one they rarely get sentenced. So the death penalty can carry biases.

Another bias of the death penalty is that it can be racist. A disproportionate number of non-whites are sentenced to death. Before the 1970s when the death penalty was still used for rape, no white men were executed for raping a white woman. Whereas most non-white people found guilty of raping a white women were executed. However all of these bias have no position in helping abolish the death penalty as defenders of the death penalty say that because nothing inherent in the law of capital punishment causes sexist, racist or class bias in its use, these kinds of discrimination are not sufficient reason for abolishing the death penalty.

As a conclusion of this essay, I have stated all sides of the discussion whether capital punishment should be brought back. Clearly the points opposing the death penalty far out number the one for it so I shall have to agree that it is right that the death penalty should be abolished, considering the bias and all other factors that go to abolishing the death penalty. However, if you sentence a person to a life prison sentence it doesn’t just affect the person alone, it affects the whole family. Putting it into context it is really the person being sentenced to death, as they don’t have much of a life. I bet sometimes they wish they had been sentenced to death.

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