Pros And Cons Of The Death Penalty

Through statistics, newspaper articles, internet findings and information from the US General Accounting office today I am going to persist in convincing my target audience that the death penalty is not a part of the correctional system . I will begin with a quote by Richard Dieter, an executive director from the death penalty information center, "The punishment of criminals by society is for the protection of society from punishment. But since such treatment is directed to the criminal rather than the crime, its great object should be his moral regeneration. The state has not discharged its whole duty to the criminal when it has punished him, nor even when it has reformed him. Having raised him up, it has further duty to aid in holding him
Since the death penalty was reinstated, over 100 death row inmates have had their convictions overturned. Over half of these reversals have occurred since 1990. This is not a problem that is going away—the system is human and fallible. Mistakes can happen anywhere in the criminal justice system, but with the death penalty they bury their mistakes. And with so many mistakes revealed in recent years, they should not be executing anyone. If the death penalty were an assembly line, and it produced defective products that were endangering people's lives, the factory would be closed; and the products would be recalled. Here's a true story of a boy named Anthony Porter that I found in Chicago Sun Times. Porter was scheduled to be executed in September 1998 in Illinois. Porter was mentally retarded and his attorneys successfully asked the judge for a hearing to determine whether he was competent enough to be executed. With this long delay waiting execution, there was an opportunity for a journalism class at Northwestern University to take Porter's case as an investigative exercise. The students assigned to Porter's case tried to re-enact the scene of the crime, but the description from the trial would not match the real scene. They next contacted one of the witnesses. Amazingly, she admitted that she had lied about Porter at his trial. Moreover, she led the
Even if the death penalty is unfairly administered, and makes too many mistakes, and even if it does not make society safer and costs hundreds of millions of dollars, at least it serves the victims of crime. According to the death penalty information center Today, many victims' families are turning away from the death penalty. For one thing, the death penalty produces division in the victims' community and disappointment for 99% of the families involved. Since less than 1% of those who commit murder are ever executed, the families in the rest of the cases may feel cheated that their loved one was somehow short changed. And even where the death penalty is "the reward," it will only occur after 10 long years of uncertainty before an execution is carried out. Most likely, the case will be overturned at least once, it will be tried again, and in many instances a different sentence will result. We should not be putting victims through such a roller coaster of unpredictability. They should know right from the start that an execution is one of the least likely outcomes in their