Essay about capital punishment

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Capital Punishment

One of the most controversial topics that affects the United States and other nations in

general is the death penalty and if it really is a proper way to serve justice. What really is the death penalty? The death penalty is a legal process where an individual is sentenced to death as a way to punish him or her for his or her crime. The history of the death penalty is a long and brutal one. It dates back from the stoning and crucifixion killings of the B.C. era to today’s methods of the electric chair and lethal injection. Governments of many kinds have sentenced people to death for thousands of years. Thirty­five states in the United States of America currently practice the death penalty. The remaining 15 do not. For most practicing states, the death penalty is a response to first­degree murder along with one of several aggravating circumstances. The death penalty is one of the most controversial topics in American society today because many argue that capital punishment is immoral, uncivilized, and they claim that it is ineffective at bringing crime rates down. Some also believe that it gives the government the right to play god in a sense. Others believe that certain crimes are so severe and horrendous that the only proper punishment is death. (DP FOCUS)
What is the purpose of punishment? They say we are led from one major source, our parents. When your young child does what he just saw in a Rambo movie, you give him a lecture about what is real and what is not, what is acceptable in real life and what is not. When your child tries some crazy wrestling move off a piece of furniture and hurts himself, you might spank him to be sure that he remembers never to do it again.So when the child grows up, breaks

into a home, and steals electronics, he gets caught and goes to prison. His time in prison is meant to deprive him of the freedom to go where he wants anywhere in the world, and to do what he wants when he wants. This is the punishment, and most people do learn from it. In general, no one wants to go back. But if that child grows up and murders someone for fun , and they are in turn put to death, they are taught nothing, because they are no longer alive to learn from it. We cannot rehabilitate a person by killing him or her.(Amnesty, USA)

“An eye for an eye makes the world go blind “ (Ghandi). Seeking death for someone who committed a crime is nothing short of just plain old revenge. Seeking for a murderer to be sentenced to death will not bring back anyone they have killed. Looking to execute a rapist for all the rapes they have committed will not fix the emotional state of their rape victim or victims.
Seeking for a murderer to be sentenced to death will not teach them any lesson, but instead they will be spared from serving a horrific life time in prison. The death penalty can be looked at as the government’s way of playing god and saying that they are serving justice. However, the death penalty all around has numerous flaws to it. These flaws range from the fact that it does not really serve justice, to the fact that it is very time consuming and expensive to be able to sentence someone to death. (DP INFO)
People who agree with the Death Penalty is on a purely emotional based decision. Many innocent people have been convicted and executed. The wrongful execution of an innocent person is an injustice that can never be rectified. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty,
142 men and women have been released from Death Row nationally, some only minutes away from execution. Moreover, in the past two years evidence indicates that four men may have been

wrongfully executed in recent years for crimes they did not commit. This error rate is simply appalling, and completely unacceptable, when we are talking about life and death.(DP INFO)
The death penalty is applied at random, it is usually based on politics, and the quality
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