Federal Death Penalty Cases example essay topic

One of the most controversial topics in America today is the death penalty. Four thousands of years the death penalty has been used all over the world. In the earlier centuries the townsmen would hang people if they were accused as being a witch, but they were not witches at all. They merely knew a little more information than the next person. They were wrongly accused, and that is why I see the death penalty as immoral, unethical and just wrong! People were put to death for no reason; they were accused because there wasn't enough evidence to prove their innocence.

Here in America you are innocent until proven guilty. That is not the way it is, you are guilty until proven innocent is the right way to look at the society today. In this essay I will show statistics, pros, cons, moral issues, etc about the death penalty. The word 'capitol'; in " capital punishment'; refers to a person's head. In the past, people were often executed by severing their head from their body. The United States is one of the very few industrialized countries in the world that executes criminals.

It is one of the few countries in the world that executes mentally ill persons, persons with very low IQ, and child murders (i.e. persons who were under 18 at the time of their crime). On August 22, 2000, 'Virginia and Texas each executed two men who committed their crimes when they were under 18' (Sara Rimer and Raymond Bonner). Which in my personal opinion is just wrong. As of October 19, 2000, during the last decade of the 20th century, 547 prisoners were executed in the United States -- one third of them in Texas. Another 3,500 wait on death rows. When asked whether people prefer to keep or abolish the death penalty, about 60 to 80% of American adults say that they want to keep capital punishment.

Numbers vary depending upon the exact wording of the question asked by the pollsters. When asked whether they would like to see executions continue or have them replaced with a system that guaranteed life imprisonments with no hope for parole, ever; that the inmate would work in the prison to earn money; that the money would be directed to helping the family of the person (s) that they killed. Capital punishment has been a cause for debate for many years, and people continue to disagree on the topic. There are many reasons why the death penalty should be used, but the three most important are that it deters potential murderers from committing crimes, it saves our government money in the long run, and most importantly, it guarantees that these convicted murderers will not kill again. Why does the United States need capital punishment? The main purpose of the death penalty is to protect the rights of other Americans to live.

When one person infringes on another's rights, he must be punished. To do this, the punishment must be harsh enough to deter potential criminals. This punishment is of the harshest form, but it is necessary to maintain order. The death penalty also saves the government money in the long run. 'Let's look at the Times' figures.

The paper reports that the 12 states that do not have the death penalty do not have higher homicide rates than those which do. In 10 of the 12, in fact, the rate is lower. As for the states that instituted capital punishment after the Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976, their homicide rates have gone up, up, up. In other words, the death penalty does nothing'. (Cohen). When a convicted killer is given life without parole, the appeals made by attorneys on both sides, as well as appeals by the court and the judges involved, add up to millions of dollars our government wastes every year, not to mention money for the convicted murderers food and clothing, etc.

Lastly, I feel that capital punishment is the only way of making sure that a murderer will not kill again. Many people disagree this argument by saying, Well, what about life in prison without parole? Doesn't that do the same thing? Sadly, most convicted murderers are not given life prison terms, especially with their first murder. The average prison sentence for murder is less than six years! The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 1998, thirty-seven states and the federal prison system held 3,452 prisoners under sentence of death, all of which had committed murder.

Among the inmates with available criminal histories, two out of three had a prior felony conviction, and even more abhorrent, one in two had a prior homicide conviction. The cold hard truth is that if a convicted murderer is allowed to go free, he / she will most likely murder again. At least six percent of murderers kill again within six years of their release. So here we have a guy sitting on death row, lets say he killed five people. Fine he goes through court cases through our beautiful judicial system and millions of dollars are gone to several weeks of trials. During this time the prisoner is spending his time as an inmate at a local jail housing.

We are spending our money on the prison for him to stay there. By the time the death penalty is allowed he has spent many years in the prison using up our money and then finally we have him executed. All that time, and time is money, is spent on that one prisoner. Now let me move on to say that we, as citizens, pay taxes no matter what. Our hard earned money and taxes paid goes toward everything including prisons. We have no say as to what to spend the money on and no matter what, we will continue paying taxes till the end of time.

Here are a few statistics for the benefit of my essay; since 1976, more than 580 people have been executed in the United States. Over 50% of those have been killed since 1992. More than three-quarters of all executions since 1976 took place in Southern states. The reality is that lynching still exists its just legal now. Former Texas Gov. George Bush has personally signed death warrants for 100 executions. President Clinton's 1994 crime bill added 58 more crimes that are punishable by death.

Both parties have created a 'get tough' climate that can only mean more executions. Its time to take a stand against this immoral tradition that has haunted over us. We are not barbarians, we are civilized people, or so we say. We have laws which I will summarize, if you kill a human being in any manner done on purpose, or in some cases, by accident, you are sentenced to imprisonment and then some. At the end of the court case if you are guilty enough to receive the death penalty then the government does nothing but go against its values and kill you! I am undoubtedly against barbaric deeds against human beings.

Here I will present a few more reasons on my opinion: African Americans are 12% of the U.S. population, but are 43% of prisoners on death row. Although Blacks constitute 50% of all murder victims, 83% of the victims in death penalty cases are white. Since 1976 only ten executions involved a white defendant who had killed a Black victim. In all, only 37 of the over 18,000 executions in this country's history involved a white person being punished for killing a Black person.

A comprehensive Georgia study found that killers of whites are 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than killers of Blacks. More than 75% of those on federal death row are non-white. Of the 156 federal death penalty prosecutions approved by the Attorney General since 1988, 74% of the defendants were non-white. The death penalty punishes the poor. If you can afford good legal representation, you won't end up on death row.

And last but not least, an FBI study shows that states that have abolished the death penalty averaged lower murder rates than states that have not. ' The commission, which was headed by Walter T. Cox, who was on the South Carolina Supreme Court and the United States Court of Military Appeals, also recommended that in capital cases, judges give a so-called anti discrimination instruction to the jury. The instruction, which is required in federal death penalty cases, would tell the jurors they may not consider the race of the defendant or of the victim in deciding whether to impose the death penalty'. (Bonner). From the facts that I stated above i think death penalty is very much racist.

In conclusion, the death penalty may seem to be the best course of action but in reality I believe that it is not. As I have said, it is the best deterrent America employs against murder, it saves our country money, and most importantly, it guarantees that a murderer will not have the chance to kill again. But America goes against its own law and joins the society in this wrong doing. An innocent life may be at stake and no one will ever know.

Bibliography

1. Bonner, Raymond, 'Push Is on for Larger Jury in Military Capital Cases,' New York Times, September 3, 2001 2.
Bonner, Raymond and Rimer, Sara, 'Mentally Retarded Man Facing Texas Execution Draws Wide Attention,' New York Times, November 12, 2000 3.
Cohen, Richard 'Hangman, Be Gone ' The Washington Post, September 26, 2000 (op-ed) 4.