Death Penalty is a Crime To use a lethal injection, electrocution, or gas to murder someone is a crime. This is what law enforcer’s use for the death penalty, also called capital punishment. Death penalty is wrong, and making someone suffer by causing them pain is not a good way for a punishment. The death penalty is racist; also some people that received the penalty were innocent. Our country’s money is being wasted on death penalties.
Prison time is an effective deterrent to a point, with some people more time is needed. Prosecutors should have the option of using a variety of punishments in order to minimize crime. The most fundamental principle of justice is that the punishment should fit the crime. When someone plans and brutally murders another person, it would seem that justice would be better served if they too were killed as they had planned to kill another human being. Our justice system shows more sympathy for criminals than it does victims and this should be altered.
Economist Isaac Ehrlich compared the murder rate in the United States with the rate of executions between 1933 and 1967. His conclusion: “The trade-off between the execution of an offender and the lives of potential victims it might have saved was of the order of magnitude of 1 for 8.” In other words, each use of the death penalty seems to have deterred the killing of eight potential victims. Homicides decreased by almost 36 percent immediately following a
Death Penalty Nearly half of Americans say that the death penalty is not imposed often enough (Newport). Yet the number of executions in America continues to drop. There was about half the number of executions in 2009 than 1999 (Thornburgh). Some say that the death penalty should not be used at all because we are not sure if the person is guilty. In fact, the death penalty needs to be imposed more often because it prevents the murders of innocent people, and the punishment should fit the crime.
Moreover it is shown that in many cases criminals are executed while there are reasonable doubts in their convictions and some have avoided execution by just a few hours before being exonerated. Another issue that was discussed is the inequality of death penalty in practice. There have been serious issues with racial discrimination. For reference in cases with white victims and black defendants convictions occurred twenty two percent of the time while with black victims and white defendants with percentage dropped to a measly three
The additional expense includes legal costs for expanded trials and appeals and for housing inmates in single cells. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/24/local/la-me-death-penalty-california-20120424 California's death penalty law: It simply does not work -By Ron Briggs We believed the Briggs initiative — the death penalty measure we wrote in 1977 — would bring greater justice. We were wrong. In 1977, my dad, former state Sen. John Briggs, my brother-in-law and I got together to discuss California's death penalty. We agreed it was ineffective and decided a ballot initiative was needed to expand the number of murder categories eligible for capital punishment.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, “The highest level was 80 percent in 1994, and the lowest 40 percent in the late 1990s” (Bedau Hugo, 2003). In our time, two thirds of Americans still support capital punishment and they are sure that the death penalty should not be abolished. Those people believe that the death penalty helps to prevent future crimes. When murderers take other people’s lives,
Real justice requires people to suffer for what they did and to suffer in a way that is appropriate for the crime. For example, for murder they should be murdered in the same way. By executing convicted murderers they won’t have a chance of doing the same to someone else. The very small chance of executing the wrong person is balanced by the benefits to society of putting off other murders who were thinking about doing the same. Also, DNA testing and other methods of crime scene science can now be so precise and can eliminate any uncertainty to whether someone is guilty or not.
For instance, the criminal will think twice before killing for fear of receive the strongest punishment. Death penalty actually is not an effective crime deterrent. This is because majority of people do not anticipate they will be caught. Some states in the United State such as New York, Hawaii, Alaska and Michigan do not use the death penalty had proved they had lower murder rate than the states that do. For example in 2004, crimes rate for states do not use the death penalty had 4.08 murders per 100000 inhabitants compare to states use death penalty had 6.32 murders per 100000 inhabitants.
The number of hangings fell from an average of fifteen a year in the first half of the fifties to about four a year. However some odd decisions were still made on executions, such as Hendryk Niemasz who was executed even though he appeared to have killed someone while sleepwalking. The Homicide Act was effectively unworkable because it allowed some murder to be categorized as more serious than others. For example murders with a shotgun lead to the death penalty, while brutal strangulation following a sexual assault led to imprisonment. The liberal climate would not allow this disparity as it would have been viewed as unfair and would have been one of the factors in considering the abolition of the death penalty.