Why The Death Penalty Is Wrong

In 2017, 23 individuals were executed by lethal injection for the crimes that they have committed in their life, mostly murders (Death Penalty Information Center, 2018). Most of them were executed in the state of Texas where the death penalty is still legal. To this day, a few regions of the United States still allow this controversial procedure. The debate around this penal method is largely criticized worldwide and it still generates a lot of reactions from the people defending both sides of it. The ethical dilemma around this issue comes from the fact that according to article number three of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” (UN, 1948). Since I am going to study …show more content…
The first side of this debate is the one that is against the death penalty in all parts of the United States and the world at large. According to the website of the United States’ National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, more than 90 millions Americans believe that the death penalty is wrong (NCADP, 2018). This regroupment suggests that there are many key factors that make the execution of criminals totally illogical and unnecessary. First of all, they claim that the social climate of the United States creates a racial bias targeting African-American males in the execution of prisoners. According to them, since there is already a racial bias in the judiciary system at large, there is also one when sentencing criminals to the death penalty. Their second argument is that since the American judiciary system is so flawed, the death penalty is a measure that is way too extreme to counter criminality. They claim that since 1973, 156 individuals could have been exonerated from the death row (NCADP, 2018), but since the death penalty is a final mean, innocent men died due to the imperfect penal system of the State. Other arguments from this party is that the death penalty is a very expensive measure that makes the State lose money, that the execution of criminals cause secondary trauma to the victims and their families and lastly, that the death penalty has nefast …show more content…
regarding the death penalty. There are many famous court cases that laid the ground on the matter of the acceptance of the death penalty in states such as Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina and many others, but there is one that gave a lot of arguments to the ones defending this penal procedure. The case of Gregg v. Georgia gave many reasons why the death penalty should be a legitimate punishment in criminal court cases. The first argument invoked in this case was that the death penalty creates deterrence and discourages people from committing major crimes such as murder (Gregg v. Georgia, 1976). Another argument of this party is that the death penalty is protected by the 8th Amendment of the American Constitution (Gregg v. Georgia, 1976). The 8th Amendment prohibits the federal government from imposing cruel and unusual punishments and it has been ruled in court that the death penalty was in fact constitutional. The last argument of this side is that even though a legislature may not impose excessive punishment, it is not required to select the least severe penalty possible, and a heavy burden rests upon those attacking its judgment (Gregg v. Georgia, 1976). This means that in many cases, the best solutions may be to impose a severe penalty because if people always received small sentences, they would not be scared to commit certain

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