Capital Punishment Long Due Riddance
Capital punishment is a very serious topic in the United States. This topic raises many
questions about the equality and effectiveness of the American Judicial system. Everybody
has their own opinion about the issue but an obvious and troubling question remains: is the
death penalty morally permissible? Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is
punishment that involves the ordered killing of a prisoner that has committed a serious
crime. The amount of dilemmas that arise with the use of capital punishment are incredibly
large, ranging from the innocent dying for a crime he or she never committed to racism,
and the only way to fix these problems is rid the United States of capital punishment. With
all of this in mind I believe that the death penalty should not be used as a necessary form
of punishment.
The definition that the online Webster dictionary provides is that capital punishment is the
judicially ordered execution of a prisoner as a punishment for a serious crime, often called
a capital offence or a capital crime. In the jurisdictions that practice capital punishment, it
is usually only used for a small number of criminal offences, mainly treason and
premeditated murder. However, the fifty states of the U.S. practice the method differently.
Among the 34 states that have the death penalty, five different ways of execution are used:
Electrocution, Lethal Injection, Firing Squad, Hanging, and Lethal Gas. The majority of
jurisdictions execute prisoners by lethal injection. 20 jurisdictions provide alternative
methods of execution, depending upon the inmate’s desire, the date of the execution, or a
possible unconstitutional ruling of the method. Only one state does not provide lethal
injection as a main or optional method of execution. The only state that provides for
electrocution as the only method of execution is Nebraska. No states use Hanging, Firing
Squad, or Lethal Gas as the sole method of execution (Kuttner 19).
The majority of the people that support death penalty do it on the belief that it deters
people from committing murders and treason. That, however, couldn’t be more far from
the truth. Modern scholars and theologians claim that over 20,000 homicides are
committed each year, and only 300 convicted murders receive the death penalty
(Alexander 59). From this it is evident that the death penalty doesn’t deter crime in any
manner. A better protection of the society would be achieved by incarcerating dangerous
persons for the entirety of their life with no parole. This would also address the idea of
