Death Penalty Rhetorical Analysis

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Panel affirms immorality of capital punishment Marisa Iati | Thursday, April 19, 2012 Two Notre Dame professors and a retired local priest asserted capital punishment is immoral at a Wednesday panel discussion. Adjunct Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric Ed Kelly said he opposes the death penalty for three reasons. “First of all, there are systems of privilege and oppression in place in this country that I think make it virtually impossible for the death penalty to be applied fairly and justly,” he said. “Consequently, we have many people of color and many, many poor people who find themselves on death row, and that’s unfair.” Kelly said he believes it is impossible to combat violence with violence, and that state-sanctioned violence is…show more content…
Tom McNally, a retired priest who volunteers as a chaplain at the Indiana State Prison, shared his experience speaking with prisoners on death row shortly before their executions. He said tensions run high in the small rooms where executions occur near midnight. “The men come in [and] they’re on a gurney,” McNally said. “I always wave and bless them, a last blessing, and they wave back … They close the blinds, and then a poison is injected … All the time that this is going on, there’s just this heaviness in my heart.” McNally said his experiences witnessing prisoners’ executions have caused him to consider capital punishment “terribly unfair.” Jay Tidmarsh, a professor of law, said capital punishment is unjust because some prosecutors will ask a court to put a prisoner to death while others will not. “Different prosecutors in the state have different attitudes,” Tidmarsh said. “The arbitrariness in that sense of the death penalty is, to me, stunning. It’s not the quality of the act [that determines whether someone is put to death] … In many circumstances, it is the quality of the person who decides whether or not to seek the death penalty.” The judicial system deludes all involved to believe they are not responsible for putting someone to death, Tidmarsh

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