The Death Penalty Should Be Abolished as a Form of Punishment.
Running head: The death penalty
The death penalty should be abolished as a form of punishment.
Johnathon Aaron
Excelsior
The death penalty should be abolished as a form of punishment.
This paper intends to shine some light on the death penalty in order to help the reader understand what issues face the system today and what problems can be corrected. This paper achieves this by: (1) pointing out the wrongful sentencing of innocent people and the use of DNA testing in attaining their freedom; (2) emphasizing the unjustness of the Capital Punishment system due to the arbitrary, racial and geographically biased nature of the process; And also (3) It shows that the evidence backing up deterrence as a major benefit of the death penalty is exaggerated and unsubstantiated. With a specific look at how “future dangerousness” plays a part in keeping the death penalty around and how to change that. Last it will look at the rising costs associated with Capital Punishment.
The death penalty risks too many innocent lives.
DNA testing is currently the single greatest savior of unjustly sentenced death row inmates. It aided in the exoneration of 133 prisoners between 1973 and 2009. (Schmalleger, 2011) But up until the 1960s DNA exoneration by science wasn’t even thought up. This leads us to wonder how many death row inmates are actually innocent today. In most cases, there is no DNA evidence left behind leaving only the account of eyewitnesses to validate the crime. The only issue with that is witnesses have been wrong before. One notable death row case involving an eyewitness’s misconception was DeLuna v. Texas 1983. Carlos DeLuna was wrongfully executed for killing a single mother at his local gas station even after the real killer, who bear a striking resemblance to DeLuna, was captured and placed in a cell underneath his own. The person who helped unwind this web of DeLuna is the notable Columbia law professor James Liebman. In 2001 one of Liebman’s study revealed
The death penalty should be abolished as a form of punishment.
Johnathon Aaron
Excelsior
The death penalty should be abolished as a form of punishment.
This paper intends to shine some light on the death penalty in order to help the reader understand what issues face the system today and what problems can be corrected. This paper achieves this by: (1) pointing out the wrongful sentencing of innocent people and the use of DNA testing in attaining their freedom; (2) emphasizing the unjustness of the Capital Punishment system due to the arbitrary, racial and geographically biased nature of the process; And also (3) It shows that the evidence backing up deterrence as a major benefit of the death penalty is exaggerated and unsubstantiated. With a specific look at how “future dangerousness” plays a part in keeping the death penalty around and how to change that. Last it will look at the rising costs associated with Capital Punishment.
The death penalty risks too many innocent lives.
DNA testing is currently the single greatest savior of unjustly sentenced death row inmates. It aided in the exoneration of 133 prisoners between 1973 and 2009. (Schmalleger, 2011) But up until the 1960s DNA exoneration by science wasn’t even thought up. This leads us to wonder how many death row inmates are actually innocent today. In most cases, there is no DNA evidence left behind leaving only the account of eyewitnesses to validate the crime. The only issue with that is witnesses have been wrong before. One notable death row case involving an eyewitness’s misconception was DeLuna v. Texas 1983. Carlos DeLuna was wrongfully executed for killing a single mother at his local gas station even after the real killer, who bear a striking resemblance to DeLuna, was captured and placed in a cell underneath his own. The person who helped unwind this web of DeLuna is the notable Columbia law professor James Liebman. In 2001 one of Liebman’s study revealed
Bibliography: Greenfield, L. A. (1991). Capital Punishment 1990, 15. Retrieved from http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=131648 Hayes-Harb, R., & Masuda, K Schmalleger, F. (2011). Criminal Justice Today. Upper saddle river: prenice hall. Weber, A., & Cutler, A. (2004). Lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 1-25. DOI: 10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00105-0. Furman v. Georgia 408 U.S. 238 (1972).