Abolition of the Death Penalty

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The eighth amendment to the United States Constitution located in the Bill of Rights specifies the prohibition of excessive bail as well as cruel and unusual punishment. However, what punishments are considered to be “cruel and unusual”? Courts have ruled that the means of penalty that are vicious, disgraceful, or shocking to the social morality may fall under this clause. So why is it that the death penalty continues to be utilized in several different states throughout the US? Does death not descent under the category of “cruel and unusual”? Previous cases have outlawed castration, burning at the stake, quartering, crucifixion, breaking on the wheel, and other so called forms of brutal correction. Why not death? A human being tried to death is reduced to the value of a measly discard able object in which a defendant undergoes due process but has in a sense already lost his or her rights of the trial provided in the Fourteenth Amendment. Since death has so far been a question of judicial interpretation, I propose that it be questioned no longer. I’m amending the Eighth Amendment to include the death penalty as a means of cruel and unusual punishment prohibiting further violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. I propose the needed modification of the Eighth Amendment to read: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted (including but not limited to the death penalty)” There are many reasons as to why the death penalty should be abolished. First and foremost as mentioned above, the death penalty violates a citizen’s Eighth Amendment right. In Gregg v. Georgia, a case where the death penalty is in question, Justice William J. Brennan in his dissenting opinion asserts that "Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality, and in its enormity, but it serves no

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