Apr 16, · Pro Death Penalty – Essay. One main person involved was Susan Atkins an intelligent woman twisted by the ideas of Manson. She stabbed Sharon Tate, a pregnant actress, sixteen times, Sharon begged for mercy and Susan Atkins told her "there would be no compassion for her or her unborn bar, and after tasting the victim's blood she used the blood Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins Apr 24, · Death Penalty Persuasive Essay. This assignment instructed students to write a persuasive essay which argues for a specific viewpoint or a specific action to be taken on a societal issue. I argued for a specific stance to be taken on the issue of the death penalty. The audience for this essay is the opinion section of the Sunday New York Times Persuasive Essay On Pro Death Penalty each of us chose their position, and many hands shot up in the air eager to answer. A student who believed in pro-death said that eradicating the criminal would teach society a lesson in not committing the crime, but
Pro Death Penalty - Free Essay Example | blogger.com
Jump to navigation Skip navigation. The American Civil Liberties Union believes the death penalty inherently violates the constitutional ban against cruel and unusual punishment and the guarantees of due process of law and of equal protection under the law. Furthermore, we believe that the state should not give itself the right to kill human beings — especially when it kills with premeditation and ceremony, in the name of the law or in the name of its people, and when it does so in an arbitrary and discriminatory fashion. Capital punishment is an intolerable denial of civil liberties and is inconsistent with the fundamental values of our democratic system.
The death penalty is uncivilized in theory and unfair and inequitable in practice. Through litigation, legislation, and advocacy against this barbaric and brutal institution, we strive to prevent executions and seek the abolition of capital punishment. The death penalty system in the US is applied in an unfair and unjust manner against people, largely dependent on how much money they have, the skill of their attorneys, death penalty pro essay, race of the victim and where the crime took place. People of color are far more likely to be executed than white people, especially if thevictim is white.
The death penalty is a waste death penalty pro essay taxpayer funds and has no public safety benefit. The vast majority of law enforcement professionals surveyed agree that capital punishment does not deter violent crime; a survey of police chiefs nationwide found they rank the death penalty lowest death penalty pro essay ways to reduce violent crime. They ranked increasing the number of police officers, reducing drug abuse, and creating a better economy with more jobs higher than the death penalty as the best ways to reduce violence. The FBI has found death penalty pro essay states with the death penalty have the highest murder rates.
Innocent people are too often sentenced to death. Sinceover people have been released from death rows in 26 states because of innocence. Nationally, at least one person is exonerated for every 10 that are executed. Inthe Supreme Court declared that under then-existing laws "the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty… constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. GeorgiaU. The Court, concentrating its objections on the manner in which death penalty laws had been applied, found the result so "harsh, freakish, and arbitrary" as to be constitutionally unacceptable. Making the nationwide impact of its decision unmistakable, the Court summarily reversed death sentences in the many cases then before it, which involved a wide range of state statutes, crimes and factual situations.
But within four years after the Furman decision, several hundred persons had been sentenced to death under new state capital punishment statutes written to provide guidance to juries in sentencing. These statutes require a two-stage trial procedure, in which the jury first determines guilt or innocence and then chooses imprisonment or death in the light of aggravating or death penalty pro essay circumstances. Inthe Supreme Court moved away from abolition, holding that "the punishment of death does not invariably violate the Constitution, death penalty pro essay. Subsequently 38 state legislatures and the Federal government enacted death penalty statutes patterned after those the Court upheld in Gregg.
Congress also enacted and expanded federal death penalty statutes for peacetime espionage by military personnel and for a vast range of categories of murder. Executions resumed in Since then, states have developed a range of processes to ensure that mentally retarded individuals are not executed. Many have elected to hold proceedings prior to the merits trial, many with juries, to determine whether an accused is mentally retarded. Inthe Supreme Court held that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution forbid imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed, resulting in commutation of death sentences to life for dozens of individuals across the country. As of Augustover 3, men and women are under a death sentence and more than 1, men, women and children at the time of the crime have been executed since Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Gregg v.
Georgiaet al, the ACLU continues to oppose capital punishment on moral, death penalty pro essay, practical, and constitutional grounds:. Capital punishment is cruel and unusual, death penalty pro essay. It is cruel because it is a relic of the earliest days of penology, when slavery, branding, and other corporal punishments were commonplace. Like those barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society. It is unusual because only the United States of all the western industrialized nations engages in this punishment.
It is also unusual because only a random sampling of convicted murderers in the United States receive a sentence of death. Capital punishment denies due process of law. Its imposition is often arbitrary, and always irrevocable — forever depriving an individual of the opportunity to benefit from new evidence or new laws that might warrant the reversal of a conviction, or the setting aside of a death sentence. The death penalty violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. It is applied randomly — and discriminatorily. It is imposed disproportionately upon those whose victims are white, offenders who are people of color, and on those who are poor and uneducated and concentrated in certain geographic regions of the country.
The death penalty is not a viable form of crime control. When police chiefs were asked to rank the factors that, in their judgment, reduce the rate of violent crime, they mentioned curbing drug use and putting more officers on the street, longer sentences and gun control. They ranked the death penalty as least effective. Politicians who preach the desirability of executions as a method of crime control deceive the public and mask their own failure to identify and confront the true causes of crime. Death penalty pro essay punishment wastes limited resources. It squanders the time and energy of courts, prosecuting attorneys, defense counsel, juries, and courtroom and law enforcement personnel. It unduly burdens the criminal justice system, and it is thus counterproductive as an instrument for society's control of violent crime.
Limited funds that could be used death penalty pro essay prevent and solve crime and provide education and jobs are spent on capital punishment. Opposing the death penalty does not indicate a lack of sympathy for murder victims. On the contrary, murder demonstrates a lack of respect for human life. Because life is precious and death irrevocable, murder is abhorrent, death penalty pro essay, and a death penalty pro essay of state-authorized killings is immoral. It epitomizes the tragic inefficacy and brutality of violence, rather than reason, as the solution to difficult social problems. Many murder victims do not support state-sponsored violence to avenge the death of their loved one. Sadly, these victims have often been marginalized by politicians and prosecutors, who would rather publicize the opinions of pro-death penalty family members.
Changes in death sentencing have proved to be largely cosmetic, death penalty pro essay. The defects in death-penalty laws, conceded by the Supreme Court in the early s, have not been appreciably altered by the shift from unrestrained discretion to "guided discretion. A society that respects life does not deliberately kill human beings. An execution is a violent public spectacle of official homicide, and one that endorses killing to solve social problems — the worst possible example to set for death penalty pro essay citizenry, and especially children. Governments worldwide have often attempted to justify their lethal fury by extolling the purported benefits that such killing would bring to the rest of society. The benefits of capital punishment are illusory, but the bloodshed and the resulting destruction of community decency are real.
Deterrence is a function not only of a punishment's severity, but also of its certainty and frequency. The argument most often cited in support of capital punishment is that the threat of execution influences criminal behavior more effectively than imprisonment does. As plausible as this claim may sound, death penalty pro essay, in actuality the death penalty fails as a deterrent for several reasons. A punishment can be an effective deterrent only if it is consistently and promptly employed. Capital punishment cannot be administered to meet these conditions. The proportion of first-degree murderers who are sentenced to death is small, and of this group, an even smaller proportion of people are executed.
Although death sentences in the mids increased to about per yearthis is still only about one percent of all homicides known to the police. Of all those convicted on a charge of criminal homicide, only 3 percent — about 1 in 33 — are eventually sentenced to death. Betweenthe average number of death sentences per year dropped toreducing the percentage even more. Mandatory death sentencing is unconstitutional. The possibility of increasing the number of convicted murderers sentenced to death and executed by enacting mandatory death penalty laws was ruled unconstitutional in Woodson v. North CarolinaU. A considerable time between the imposition of the death sentence and the actual execution is unavoidable, given the procedural safeguards required by the courts in capital cases.
Starting with selecting the trial jury, murder trials take far longer when the ultimate penalty is involved. Furthermore, post-conviction appeals in death-penalty cases are far more frequent than in other cases. These factors increase the time and cost of administering criminal justice. We can reduce delay and costs only by abandoning the procedural safeguards and constitutional rights of suspects, death penalty pro essay, defendants, and convicts — with the attendant high risk of convicting the wrong person and executing the innocent. This is not a realistic prospect: our legal system will never reverse itself to deny defendants the right to counsel, or the right to an appeal. Persons who commit murder and other crimes of personal violence often do not premeditate their crimes, death penalty pro essay.
Most capital crimes are committed in the heat of the moment. Most capital crimes are committed during moments of great emotional stress or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, when logical thinking has been suspended. Many capital crimes are committed by the badly emotionally-damaged or mentally ill. In such cases, violence is inflicted by persons unable to appreciate the consequences to themselves as well as to others. Even when crime is planned, the criminal ordinarily concentrates on escaping detection, death penalty pro essay, arrest, and conviction. The threat of even the severest punishment will not discourage those who expect to escape detection and arrest, death penalty pro essay.
It is impossible to imagine how the threat of any punishment could prevent a crime that is not premeditated. Furthermore, the death penalty is a futile threat for political terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh, because they usually act in the name of an ideology that honors its martyrs. Capital punishment doesn't solve our society's crime problem. Threatening capital punishment leaves the underlying causes of crime unaddressed, and ignores the many political and diplomatic sanctions such as treaties against asylum for international terrorists that could appreciably lower the incidence of terrorism. Capital punishment has been a useless weapon in the so-called "war on drugs.
It is irrational to think that the death penalty — a remote threat at best — will avert murders committed in drug turf wars or by street-level dealers. If, however, severe punishment can deter crime, then permanent imprisonment is severe enough to deter death penalty pro essay rational person from committing a violent crime. The vast preponderance of the evidence shows that the death penalty is no more death penalty pro essay than imprisonment in deterring murder and that it may even be an incitement to criminal violence.
Death-penalty states as a group do not have lower rates of criminal homicide than non-death-penalty states. Use of the death penalty in a given state may actually increase the subsequent rate of criminal homicide. Perhaps because "a return to the exercise of the death penalty weakens socially based inhibitions against the use of lethal force to settle disputes…, death penalty pro essay. In adjacent states — one with the death penalty and the other without it — the state that practices the death penalty does not always show death penalty pro essay consistently death penalty pro essay rate of criminal homicide. For example, between l and l, the homicide rates in Wisconsin and Iowa non-death-penalty states were half the rates of their neighbor, Illinois — which restored the death penalty in l, and by had sentenced persons to death and carried out two executions.
Death Penalty Pros And Cons
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Oct 08, · This argumentative essay on Argumentative Paper on the Pros of the Death Penalty was written and submitted by your fellow student. You are free to use it for research and reference purposes in order to write your own paper; however, you must cite it accordingly Apr 24, · Death Penalty Persuasive Essay. This assignment instructed students to write a persuasive essay which argues for a specific viewpoint or a specific action to be taken on a societal issue. I argued for a specific stance to be taken on the issue of the death penalty. The audience for this essay is the opinion section of the Sunday New York Times Pro Death Penalty I concur the death penalty is perfect to apply in the equity community. The death penalty is a definitive discipline our general public can give one for their activities and it not all way awful. Then again it is viewed as a disavowal of human rights that advances more prominent savagery in our general public
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