How Can Capital Punishment Be Legal
Even when crimes are planned, the criminal usually focuses on avoiding exposure, arrest, and conviction. The threat of punishment, even the heaviest, will not deter those who expect to escape discovery and arrest. It is impossible to imagine how the threat of punishment could prevent a crime that is not premeditated. Moreover, the death penalty is a senseless threat to political terrorists like Timothy McVeigh because they generally act in the name of an ideology that honors their martyrs. It is often used in distorted justice systems. In many cases registered by Amnesty International, people have been executed after being convicted after grossly unfair trials, on the basis of evidence obtained under torture and without adequate representation by a lawyer. In some countries, the death penalty is imposed as a mandatory sentence for certain crimes, meaning that judges are not able to take into account the circumstances of the crime or the accused before pronouncing the verdict. Barbara Anderson Young, the sister of James Anderson, who was allegedly run over in 2011 by a white teenager from Mississippi who allegedly wanted to harm her because he was black, wrote a letter to the local prosecutor on behalf of her family expressing the family`s opposition to the death penalty, which is “deeply rooted in our religious beliefs. a faith that was also at the heart of James` life.
The letter also eloquently demands that the defendant be spared execution because the death penalty “has historically been used in Mississippi and the South primarily against people of color for killing white people.” “Eliminating James` killer will not help balance the scales. But sparing them can help to start a dialogue that will one day lead to the abolition of the death penalty. In 1976, the Supreme Court moved away from abolition, ruling that “the death penalty does not always violate the Constitution.” The Court ruled that the new death penalty laws “contain objective standards to guide, regularize and make the death penalty process rationally verifiable.” (Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153). Subsequently, 38 state legislatures and the federal government enacted death penalty laws based on those upheld by the Court in the Gregg case. Congress has also enacted and expanded federal death penalty laws for peacetime espionage by military personnel and various categories of murder. The death penalty not only wastes lives, but also wastes money. Contrary to popular belief, it is much more expensive to execute a person than to imprison them for life.
The finality of the death penalty rightly requires that important procedural provisions be made at all stages of the death penalty in order to minimize the likelihood of error. As a result, conducting a single capital case costs about three times more than a person`s prison sentence for their remaining life expectancy, which is about 40 years. Since 1977, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, more than 1,480 people have been executed, mostly by lethal injection. Most death penalty cases involve the execution of murderers, although the death penalty can also be used for treason, espionage, and other crimes. A society that respects life does not intentionally kill people. An execution is a violent public spectacle of official murder and advocating killing to solve social problems – the worst example for citizens and especially for children. Governments around the world have often attempted to justify their murderous rage by touting the supposed benefits such murder would bring to the rest of society. The benefits of the death penalty are illusory, but the bloodshed and destruction of communal decency that results from it are real. Despite the 1976 Supreme Court decision in Gregg v.
Georgia et al, the ACLU continues to oppose the death penalty on moral, practical, and constitutional grounds: Note that Colorado and New Hampshire have prospectively abolished the death penalty. In Colorado, the governor commuted the sentences of death row inmates, but defendants whose cases were pending at the time of abolition are still entitled to execution and the implementing law is still in effect. In New Hampshire, one person is still on death row. A look at international trends and agreements highlights the specificity of the United States` retention of the death penalty. Today, more than 140 countries have abolished the death penalty, legally or in practice, and of the 58 countries that have retained the death penalty, only 21 carried out known executions in 2011. [35] In addition, the death penalty has forced the United States to refrain from signing or ratifying several important international treaties and possibly violating international agreements to which it is a party: moreover, there are documented cases where the death penalty has effectively incited the commission of the capital crimes it was intended to detach. These include cases of so-called suicide by execution syndrome – people who wanted to die but feared suicide and committed murder for the state to kill them. For example, Daniel Colwell, who suffered from mental illness in 1996, claimed that he killed a random couple in a parking lot in Georgia so that the state would kill him — he was sentenced to death and eventually committed suicide on death row. Moreover, the death penalty could only be defended for the crime of murder and not for any of the many other crimes that were often subjected to this type of punishment (rape, kidnapping, espionage, treason, drug trafficking).
