Death Penalty Persuasive Essay
Imagine a man sitting in a small, whitewashed room. He is strapped tightly to a gurney, with an IV jutting out of each of his arms. While someone administers a saline solution, his mind races and his heart pounds as he anticipates the first of three drugs that will end his life. He strains to see if his family has come, but fails: the tight leather straps see to that. He can only imagine them standing there, waiting for him to be executed. This experience, although fictional, is a very real fate for people who die by lethal injection, the most common method of execution for criminals given a death sentence (“Facts”). However, lethal injection is not the only form of execution that is inhumane—rather, all forms of the death penalty are. Worldwide,
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Yet linking these two very different civilizations is the philosophical tenet that human life is sacred, defined for this argument as having inherent meaning. It is this principle that forms the foundation of modern global legal systems and reveals why many U.S. Citizens view crimes such as murder and rape as indisputably heinous actions: they involve a conscious disregard towards, and devaluing of, another person’s life by denying their natural-born right to autonomy. The occurrence of these atrocious crimes in today’s world often sparks “an eye for an eye” mentality amongst Americans, posing the question: is capital punishment “cruel and unusual punishment”? From a justice’s interpretive standpoint, the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment,” has an elastic rather than concrete definition. In the 1958 case of Trop vs. Dulles, Chief Justice Warren determined a violation of the Eighth Amendment depends upon “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” (Harrison and Melville 168). Nearly 60 years have passed since this ruling became the legal standard, yet Pennsylvania’s government standards have remained unchanged; in fact, it is the sole death penalty state that has not proposed legislature for the abolishment or clarification of the death penalty in 2017, (“Recent Legislative Activity”) continuing to perpetuate unconstitutional
Yet linking these two very different civilizations is the philosophical tenet that human life is sacred, defined for this argument as having inherent meaning. It is this principle that forms the foundation of modern global legal systems and reveals why many U.S. Citizens view crimes such as murder and rape as indisputably heinous actions: they involve a conscious disregard towards, and devaluing of, another person’s life by denying their natural-born right to autonomy. The occurrence of these atrocious crimes in today’s world often sparks “an eye for an eye” mentality amongst Americans, posing the question: is capital punishment “cruel and unusual punishment”? From a justice’s interpretive standpoint, the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment,” has an elastic rather than concrete definition. In the 1958 case of Trop vs. Dulles, Chief Justice Warren determined a violation of the Eighth Amendment depends upon “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” (Harrison and Melville 168). Nearly 60 years have passed since this ruling became the legal standard, yet Pennsylvania’s government standards have remained unchanged; in fact, it is the sole death penalty state that has not proposed legislature for the abolishment or clarification of the death penalty in 2017, (“Recent Legislative Activity”) continuing to perpetuate unconstitutional