Death Penalty

Lethal injection has become the preferred method of execution in the United States since the early 80's. But is lethal injection a harsh enough penalty for murder? The answer is no, it is not a good enough punishment for someone who has taken the life of another. Lethal injection is a process that allows a convict to be put down quickly and painlessly, but what happened to the older methods? Methods such as hanging, electrocution, and firing squads are not used in a large scale these days. These methods are the kind that makes the offender miserable for the last moments of their life; these are the methods I think that should be used today. I am going to argue that the life in prison is not enough, the death penalty should be worse than what it is, and public executions have a greater deterrent effect.

There are a lot of families that want more justice to the person who killed a family member then life imprisonment and that is just what they should get. For a family who has one of their own taken from them, the grief they feel is unimaginable. They need justice to be served to aid them to deal with their loss; they need the victim's death to be avenged. Life imprisonment is not enough. It is not a help to a grieving family to let the offender spend the rest of his days in jail, eating three square meals a day and watching TV. Quite frankly, it is not proper justice on behalf of the victim either. Ancient civilizations would not have thought twice about sentencing a person to death for taking the life of another. Opponents of the death penalty would argue that the death penalty is barbaric and inhuman, but what about the murder of innocent people? Is life in prison the punishment we want people to believe they will receive for murder? Prisons these days are state of the art, with weight rooms, work programs, televisions, food, and warm beds.

Prison is a step up from the conditions that some people live in. Life in prison is more of a gift to some people then a