Death Penalty
By Thaddeus Giberson
Topic Overview
Essay
Picture two people sitting on death row, waiting for death to come and claim them from the prison they’ve spent twenty miserable years of their life in. Both of them are convicted murderers. One of them is innocent and could have been exonerated by a simple DNA test that the government felt was unnecessary. The other committed the crime, but the court failed to recognized that it was completely accidental. The death penalty is used too frequently, and the government should evaluate inmates before they go on death row to see whether or not they could pose a threat to society if they escaped and whether there is irrefutable evidence for their crime.
People that commit a murder by accident or in a fit of rage should not be executed for the crime when their return to society would not endanger those around them. Sometimes accidents happen, and in some extreme accidents people die. In a courtroom, sometimes the fact that it was accidental just flies right by. Do they deserve to die for something they weren't trying to do. People argue that all murderers deserve to die, but this eye for an eye mentality will make the world blind, or in this case dead. The raw purpose of the death penalty is to completely remove the chance of someone who could be a danger to society if they escaped from escaping. If someone who commits a murder because of a lifetime culmination of bad treatment from someone and then one day just snaps and kills them, then if they stayed out in society would they really kill anyone else. No one else has been wronging them for years and years. I think instead of executing every murderer, the state should spend their money better suited for helping rehabilitate people.Accidents happen sometimes, even by the state, before an execution happens the state should be required to have found irrefutable evidence proving that the guilty party is in fact guilty. Studies show that approximately 4.1% of people executed in the United States each year are innocent. This may not seem like much, but with the average 36 execution each year almost 2 innocent people are being killed each year. Others may say that the deterrent of crime by the death penalty saves 10 lives for every 2 it takes, but in our own Declaration of Independence it states that "all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men," and if our government cannot secure the basic right of life to its law abiding citizens then is it doing what it needs to be doing? If the government would make extensive DNA tests required before any execution we could reduce the number of innocents that are being killed to 0.
Before inmates are executed, the state should confirm their guiltiness with conclusive data, and their threat to society should be evaluated to see whether or not they are deserving of the death penalty. If these changes were made we could cut back on innocents being executed and help more convicted murderers be rehabilitated and rejoin society as law abiding citizens.
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