Death Penalty Essay, Research Paper

Morality is defined as ?the principles of right and wrong?. As moral creatures, humans deserve praise for good deeds, and punishment for bad ones. Punishment may range from a slap on the wrist to death, but the punishment must fit the crime, Morally, it is wrong to incarcerate someone for murder. A sentence of life in an air conditioned, cable equipped prison where a person gets free meals three times a day, personal recreation time, and regular visits with friends and family is a slap in the face of morality. Regardless of the conditions of a particular prison, someone who murders another human being can only be made to pay for his actions by forfeiting his own life. This is so, simply because a loss of freedom does not and cannot compare to a loss of life. In reality, the murderer actually gets off easy when he is sentenced to death. Executions in this country are performed by lethal injection and electrocution. If a person is lethally injected, he is first put to sleep, and then he is administered drugs that will stop his heart. Thiopental Sodium is a fast acting drug that produces almost short -term unconsciousness after a single dose, it is also used as a ” truth serum ” administered in small, intermittent, carefully calibrated hypnotic dosed while the subjects counts backward from 100. A trance-like, semi-consciousness is usually reached before the count gets to 90. To complete the lethal mixture for execution, society has stipulated the addition of potassium chloride. A high level of potassium in the blood paralyzes the heart muscle. In effect, then, that would correspond to a heart attack for the condemned while in the deep sleep of a barbiturate coma. As April, 1991, the method of execution in 21 states is lethal injection. If a person faces the electric chair, he is dead within 180 seconds max. Electricity causes biological damage through both heat and electrochemical havoc. The electrical current itself abolishes the function of organs and tissues such as the brain, nerves, and heart by overwhelming the fragile bioelectrical basis of the metabolism. The voltage applied is not the most critical factor but is in fact, almost irrelevant as much as electrical pressure was a factor. The body can tolerate a lot of volts without discomfort. The type of electrical current, too, makes a difference-whether direct or alternating . The latter is more dangerous and can be lethal even with low voltage and relatively low amperage. The alternating cycle of 60 per second, which is ordinary 110-120 volt house current, will invariably stop heart action through stand still or ventricular fibrillation if the body somehow becomes part of a circuit. Compare this is to the heinous crimes of the murderer, where often the victim will go through excruciating pain for minutes, hours or sometimes days.