Well, as my sophomore year of high school comes to an end, I have to go through on obstacle before I can reach my vacations.
Final exams.
It’s so mean, having to take these tests before a great summer. We can’t just slip easily into a world of relaxation. However, I see why. We students would have nothing to work for, to achieve, and to aim. School teaches you a lot more than knowledge about the material. It refines your personality, therefore, I actually love school, it allows me to explore the possibilities of my personality. It’s like pick-and-choose who you are, except through destiny.
That doesn’t make so much sense.
Anyway, for one of my finals, I have to do a project about one of the issues in America, and my friend and I have chosen the death penalty. Not that I really care- the class I’m in is a joke, and I’m 95% sure I will get an “A” no matter what. But, really, it is an interesting subject. The death penalty seems so harsh – “cruel and unusual punishment.” There are so many ways one can oppose the use of this penalty. That’s why my assignment is hard- I have to be FOR the death penalty.
On this site, I found reasonsfor why the DP would be refuted. One reason would be that no matter how many are killed, our crime rate here in the US continues to increase. I find this are hard point to create a rebuttal for. It’s totally true. Nobody is afraid of dying. There are all these martyrs out there that don’t care, and then there are the adventurous, taking whatever their life throws at them. (Although, calling people martyrs and adventurous makes them sound better than they might actually be!) And then another is that we may kill someone that is in fact innocent. I can agree, that an innocent person could be killed – I had read an article in the Reader’s Digest not too long ago about a man who was innocent, yet falsely accused and jailed for 30 years until his innocence had been proved. Supposing he had died? That would have been a loss for the family – and, oh- the government would have to a few others to their list of people who might form an anarchist movement.
Yet, is it better that we don’t kill people at all? Some deserve it. Ethically, there are so many people who should never get another chance to live, because of their crimes. If you kill, you get killed right? This is where the death penalty crosses the path of one of the greatest men to walk the earth – Mahatma Gandhi. What did he say, now? “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” I do wonder what Gandhi would have said if faced witha final project like this. He used non-violence and fought off a powerful nation with words. If someone killed his a loved one, I suppose he wouldn’t have rushed to Indian government and pleaded with them to hunt out the murderer and kill he or she, too.
Ahh. I picked a hard prompt. Here I am, making a good arguement for the other side!
Now, I just have to find a way to say the opposite. Pah.
WIsh me luck.
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June 15, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Dudley Sharp
The Death Penalty: More Protection for Innocents
Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters, contact info below
Often, the death penalty dialogue gravitates to the subject of innocents at risk of execution. Seldom is a more common problem reviewed. That is, how innocents are more at risk without the death penalty.
Living murderers, in prison, after release or escape or after our failures to incarcerate them, are much more likely to harm and murder, again, than are executed murderers.
This is a truism.
No knowledgeable and honest party questions that the death penalty has the most extensive due process protections in US criminal law.
Therefore, actual innocents are more likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment and more likely to die in prison serving under that sentence, that it is that an actual innocent will be executed.
That is. logically, conclusive.
16 recent studies, inclusive of their defenses, find for death penalty deterrence.
A surprise? No.
Life is preferred over death. Death is feared more than life.
Some believe that all studies with contrary findings negate those 16 studies. They don’t. Studies which don’t find for deterrence don’t say no one is deterred, but that they couldn’t measure those deterred.
What prospect of a negative outcome doesn’t deter some? There isn’t one . . . although committed anti death penalty folk may say the death penalty is the only one.
However, the premier anti death penalty scholar accepts it as a given that the death penalty is a deterrent, but does not believe it to be a greater deterrent than a life sentence. Yet, the evidence is compelling and un refuted that death is feared more than life.
“This evidence greatly unsettles moral objections to the death penalty, because it suggests that a refusal to impose that penalty condemns numerous innocent people to death.” (1)
” . . . a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel, rather than forbid, (capital) punishment.” (1)
“Recent evidence suggests that capital punishment may have a significant deterrent effect, preventing as many as eighteen or more murders for each execution.” (1)
Some death penalty opponents argue against death penalty deterrence, stating that it’s a harsher penalty to be locked up without any possibility of getting out.
Reality paints a very different picture.
What percentage of capital murderers seek a plea bargain to a death sentence? Zero or close to it. They prefer long term imprisonment.
What percentage of convicted capital murderers argue for execution in the penalty phase of their capital trial? Zero or close to it. They prefer long term imprisonment.
What percentage of death row inmates waive their appeals and speed up the execution process? Nearly zero. They prefer long term imprisonment.
This is not, even remotely, in dispute.
Life is preferred over death. Death is feared more than life.
Furthermore, history tells us that “lifers” have many ways to get out: Pardon, commutation, escape, clerical error, change in the law, etc.
In choosing to end the death penalty, or in choosing not implement it, some have chosen to spare murderers at the cost of sacrificing more innocent lives.
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Furthermore, possibly we have sentenced 20-25 actually innocent people to death since 1973, or 0.3% of those so sentenced. Those have all been released upon post conviction review. The anti death penalty claims, that the numbers are significantly higher, are a fraud, easily discoverable by fact checking.
6 inmates have been released from death row because of DNA evidence. An additional 9 were released from prison, because of DNA exclusion, who had previously been sentenced to death.
The innocents deception of death penalty opponents has been getting exposure for many years. Even the behemoth of anti death penalty newspapers — The New York Times — has recognized that deception.
“To be sure, 30 or 40 categorically innocent people have been released from death row . . . “. ‘ (2) This when death penalty opponents were claiming the release of 119 “innocents” from death row. Death penalty opponents never required actual innocence in order for cases to be added to their “exonerated” or “innocents” list. They simply invented their own definitions for exonerated and innocent and deceptively shoe horned large numbers of inmates into those definitions – something easily discovered with fact checking.
There is no proof of an innocent executed in the US, at least since 1900.
If we accept that the best predictor of future performance is past performance, we can reasonable conclude that the DNA cases will be excluded prior to trial, and that for the next 8000 death sentences, that we will experience a 99.8% accuracy rate in actual guilt convictions. This improved accuracy rate does not include the many additional safeguards that have been added to the system, over and above DNA testing.
Of all the government programs in the world, that put innocents at risk, is there one with a safer record and with greater protections than the US death penalty?
Unlikely.
———————–
Full report - All Innocence Issues: The Death Penalty, upon request.
Full report – The Death Penalty as a Deterrent, upon request
(1) From the Executive Summary of
Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs, March 2005
Prof. Cass R. Sunstein, Cass_Sunstein(AT)law.uchicago.edu
Prof. Adrian Vermeule , avermeule(AT)law.harvard.edu
Full report http://aei-brookings.org/admin/authorpdfs/page.php?id=1131
(2) “The Death of Innocents’: A Reasonable Doubt”,
New York Times Book Review, p 29, 1/23/05, Adam Liptak,
national legal correspondent for The NY Times
—————————–
Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters
e-mail sharpjfa@aol.com, 713-622-5491,
Houston, Texas
Mr. Sharp has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, FOX, NBC, NPR, PBS , VOA and many other TV and radio networks, on such programs as Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The O’Reilly Factor, etc., has been quoted in newspapers throughout the world and is a published author.
A former opponent of capital punishment, he has written and granted interviews about, testified on and debated the subject of the death penalty, extensively and internationally.
Pro death penalty sites
homicidesurvivors(dot)com/categories/Dudley%20Sharp%20-%20Justice%20Matters.aspx
www(dot)dpinfo.com
www(dot)cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DPinformation.htm
www(dot)clarkprosecutor.org/html/links/dplinks.htm
www(dot)coastda.com/archives.html
www(dot)lexingtonprosecutor.com/death_penalty_debate.htm
www(dot)prodeathpenalty.com
www(dot)yesdeathpenalty.com/deathpenalty_co
yesdeathpenalty.googlepages.com/home2 (Sweden)
www(dot)wesleylowe.com/cp.html