Taylor Goode
Business Law I
9 March 2020
Professor O’Boyle
A major debate in society is whether or not the death penalty constitutes cruel
and unusual punishment, as twenty-two states have abolished the death penalty,
leaving twenty-eight states continuing its use. The death penalty is a sentence in
certain cases, for more serious crimes like murder and rape, in which the guilty
person will be put to death by the electric chair or lethal injection. The eighth
amendment which protects citizens of the United States from cruel and unusual
punishment from the government is violated by the use of the death penalty.
Murderers kill and take away other peoples’ lives and if we start deciding whose life
to take and when to take it, aren’t we stooping down to their level? The death
penalty is cruel and unusual as not only do the real criminals suffer but innocent
people, too. There have been a number of times where the person convicted for the
crime and whom is sentenced to death is not the person who committed the crime.
There are many cases where an innocent man is on death row for a murder that he
did not commit. Sometimes the conviction is based on race or sexuality where the
person was solely convicted because the way that they look or the type of people
that they love. The death penalty is not only cruel, but the costs are outrageous; it
would cost less for someone to spend the rest of their life in jail than to be put to
death. As a good portion of that money comes from taxpayers, there definitely are
better uses than to use it on a dangerous criminal. Another factor that comes into
play is the families of the victims, the families want the criminal to suffer for their
crimes and get what they deserve. When someone is put on death row it means that
their suffering is coming to an end as they approach their death, however, if they
were sentenced to life in prison they would be suffering for the rest of their lives with
nothing else to do but wait for their life to end naturally.
The death penalty can and has been given to innocent people for crimes they
did not commit because they were wrongfully found guilty in court. There are
instances when these people are executed and later found to be innocent; leaving a
criminal out in the world and an innocent person dead. New studies have shown that
for every twenty-five people sentenced to death, one of those people are innocent
and considering that there are currently around 21,919 people on death row in the
whole world, that’s a good portion of innocent people on death row.
1
Now if every
person per twenty-five people is innocent, that leaves around 870 people who have
been falsely placed on death row. Only 1.6 percent of these innocent people are
exonerated; meaning that if we stick with the 870 people, only 13 people would be
exonerated, and the remaining 856 innocent people would be put to death.
Many times, when an innocent person is placed on death row, it is simply due
to the biased opinions of the jurors. According to “The Case Against the Death
Penalty”:
1
Levy, Pema, ONE IN 25 SENTENCED TO DEATH IN THE U.S. IS INNOCENT, STUDY
CLAIMS, 2014. https://www.newsweek.com/one-25-executed–us-innocent-study-claims-248889
The death penalty system in the US is applied in an unfair and unjust
manner against people, largely dependent on how much money they
have, the skill of their attorneys, race of the victim and where the crime
took place. People of color are far more likely to be executed than
white people, especially if the victim is white.
2
This statement holds true as seen in the Scottsboro Boys case, where nine young
African American men were accused of raping two white women on a train in 1931
in Alabama. It started as a few young white men initiated a fight with the nine boys,
where the white men were asked to leave the train. In a rage, they told people that
the nine boys raped the two white women who were on the train and as they
approached their stop, the boys arrived to see a riot waiting for them. The town was
