Should Capital Punishment be Abolished?

               The death penalty is the most severe punishment in the world. It is a controversial issue with a long and bloody history. More than 60% of the worldwide population lives in countries where executions take place. The four most populated countries in the world are the People’s Republic of China, India, the United States and Indonesia. All of these areas enforce the death penalty and are unlikely to abolish it any time soon. Did you know in 2009 a total of 69 people were publicly beheaded in Saudi Arabia, not only that but in the United States about 13,000 people have been legally executed since colonial times. Thus capital punishment should be abolished because it is immoral, the issue of inadequate legal representation and the threat of executing an innocent person.

            The action of taking another person’s life is widely considered immoral and against human rights. Let’s take a look at the 1992 Robert Harris case, the State of California murdered a man. With much fanfare, law enforcement officials strapped him into an airtight torture chamber and slowly pumped in cyanide gas until he was dead. Under common law the killing of another human being is justifiable only in self-defense. At the time of his execution though, Robert Harris was incarcerated, unable to threaten anyone. And still the State of California murdered him, in a manner so gruesome that it has been banned in warfare since 1925 (H.Hersch, 1992). Isn’t this the same as murder? In fact according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 3, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” As a matter of fact many victim’s families rejects the use of death penalty, using an execution to try to right the wrong of their loss is an affront to them and only causes more pain. For example, Bud Welch's daughter Julie was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Although his first reaction was to wish that those who committed this terrible crime be killed, he ultimately realized that such killing "is simply vengeance and it was vengeance that killed Julie....Vengeance is a strong and natural emotion, but it has no place in our justice system." Some people might argue our first instinct is to inflict immediate pain on someone who wrongs us, the standards of a mature society demand a more measured response. The emotional impulse for revenge is not a sufficient justification for invoking a system of capital punishment, with all its accompanying problems and risks. Our laws and criminal justice system should lead us to higher principles that demonstrate a complete respect for life, even the life of a murderer. Encouraging our basest motives of revenge, which ends in another killing, extends the chain of violence (Michigan State University, 2000).

            Perhaps the most important factor in determining whether a defendant will receive the death penalty is the quality of the representation he or she is provided.

Almost all defendants in capital cases cannot afford their own attorneys. In many cases, the appointed attorneys are overworked, underpaid, or lacking the trial experience required for death penalty cases. There have even been instances in which lawyers appointed to a death case were so inexperienced that they were completely unprepared for the sentencing phase of the trial. Other appointed attorneys have slept through parts of the trial, or arrived at the court under the influence of alcohol. In the words of  Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial…People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.” In Washington state, one-fifth of the 84 people who have faced execution in the past 20 years were represented by lawyers who had been, or were later, disbarred, suspended or arrested. Overall, the state's disbarment rate for attorneys is less than 1% (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Aug. 6-8, 2001). Other examples such as an investigation by the Chicago Tribune, 12% of those sentenced to death from 1976-1999 were represented by, "an attorney who had been, or was later, disbarred or suspended--disciplinary sanctions reserved for conduct so incompetent, unethical or even criminal that the state believes an attorney's license should be taken away." An additional 9.5% inmates, "have received a new trial or sentencing because their attorneys' incompetence rendered the verdict or sentence unfair, court records show" (Armstrong & Mills, 1999).

            Once an inmate is executed, nothing can be done to make amends if a mistake has been made. There is considerable evidence that many mistakes have been made in sentencing people to death. According to Michigan State University and Death Penalty Information Center, Since 1973 at least 88 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged. During the same period of time, over 650 people have been executed. Thus for every seven people executed we have found one person on death row who never should have been convicted. If this keeps on going we are naively imposing the death penalty to innocent people based on inaccurate reasons.

            So from this entire data what have we found? We have found that capital punishment is against human rights plus the large influence which the legal representation has is unjust considering the lower income class, lastly there’s the issue of innocence. There is no credible evidence that capital punishment deters crime, so why support it?

                                     

[993 words]

References :

- Filip, S. (2011, 04 06). Statistics on capital punishment. Retrieved from http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/stats-on-human-rights/statistics-on-capital-punishment/

- Michigan State University. , & Death Penalty Information Centre, (2000). Arguments for and against the death penalty. Retrieved from http://deathpenaltyinfo.msu.edu/

- Armstrong, K., & Mills, S. (1999, 11 15). Inept defenses cloud verdict. Chicago Tribune

- Inadequate legal representation. (2001, 08 14). Retrieved from http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=83

- H.Hersch, M. (1992, 04 24). Death penalty cannot be justified with arguments. The Tech. Retrieved from http://tech.mit.edu/V112/N22/hersch.22o.html