My opinion on the death penalty

The death penalty in American society...

It is my belief that capital punishment is not a punishment for civilized nations and has many flaws, meaning many innocent people are executed. There is a great hypocrisy to the death penalty too. If you kill someone, does than mean you should be killed? I think not. If our society acted in that way there would be many problems. The United States is the only 'developed' country that still uses the death penalty. What does that tell you?

Capital punishment is brought upon only some individuals. There are those murderous who have mental problems, had a horrible and traumatizing life, and some who got caught up in the heat of the moment. There is no truly "bad" person, only people we consider sociopaths, psychotic, or other variants of non-mainstream mental factors. We should have better correctional facilities and help for those with mental problems and horrible lives (poverty, childhood abuse, etc.). One that is a minority (race wise) is more than 10 times more likely to be executed for the same crime as a person (not of a minority) committed in the US.

I have trouble understanding how the United States of America, out of all developed nations in our world, feels the need to use the costly and inhumane death penalty. The United States Constitution's Eighth Amendment protects against 'cruel and unusual punishment'. The European Union and the United Nations (as well as other respected multi- and international bodies) have ruled that the death penalty is stampeding on human rights, and is obviously cruel. Notice I said costly, it is true that the death penalty on a person is more expensive than having them in a correctional facility for their life or sentence. Another problem is that there is no way to know certain factory about the person, such as whether they have some hidden mental problems or had horrible abuse in their childhood that traumatized them for the rest of their life. These two features show up, along with poverty and peer pressure crimes, many times in homicide and other high felony cases. Socioeconomic factors are often supreme in the case of someone on death row.

I believe the death penalty is not only wrong, but legally troubling. Is it right to take the life of a person just because they took other lives? In all cases: no. Some people can be made to be working members of society, some can not, but that does not mean they should be given the shot of death. If the goal of punishment for law-breaking is to punish then rehabilitate a law-breaker into society, then the death penalty and other extreme punishments — as well as the criminal justice systems of the United States and other nations — have failed that principle of law and order in a civilized society. The Danish penal system may be worth a look at.

A penalty of death is neither moral nor ethical to the parties to it, society in general, and humankind as a whole.

More (e.g. references, additional views) soon...
Modified on 8 October 2006.

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