Crime is a major problem in our world today. Some people in our country live in fear that they will be the next victim of a crime; they could be robbed, raped, or even murdered. There are so many theories on how to stop crime. One of the theories is the use of the death penalty as a deterrent. There are a lot of issues that surround that idea that make the use of the death penalty just as bad as the accused committing murder. It is very contradictive, inconsistent, and unethical. Although some people believe that the death penalty deters crime, there are many arguments against it. For example, the costs are extremely high, racism is involved, and there are innocent people on death row to list a few.
Stanley Tookie Williams is a great example of how the death penalty is unethical. He was the person responsible for creating the Crips gang in California back in the …show more content…
One of those is that the death penalty saves innocent lives by preventing convicted murderers from killing again. Some sense of the risk here is the fact that of roughly 52,000 state prison inmates serving time for murder, an estimate 810 had previously been convicted of murder and had killed 821 persons following those convictions. Executing each of these inmates after the first murder conviction would have saved the lives of more than 800 persons (Cassell). But having the people serve life sentences could’ve served the same purpose of preventing murder. Politics, quality of legal counsel and the jurisdiction where a crime is committed are more often the determining factors in a death penalty case than the facts of the crime itself. The death penalty is a lethal lottery: of the 22,000 homicides committed every year approximately 150 people are sentenced to death (Death Penalty Focus). Most of the 150 people were African American, which shows that the system is unethical and displays