The death penalty violates the 8th amendment which protects citizens from cruel and unusual punishment. People have argued this point for years, yet the death penalty still exists in America today. Many countries have banned the death penalty all together, while others have banned it in most circumstances, but America has yet to do either and still uses the death penalty.
But why do we use the death penalty? An eye for an eye is the same as a life for a life? It’s not like killing someone will bring someone else back to life. Over-crowding in prisons? Build more prisons if the world is really so awful. At least for life in prison, if there was a mistake in the sentence, that person can be freed one day. You can’t undo a murder, once the death penalty has been done there’s no turning back. With modern technology, we’re finding out that there have been over 100 cases where someone was killed with the death penalty who wasn’t actually guilty of committing a crime. And technology is still developing; no one can say how many others will be found. If these people had been sentenced to life in prison, hopefully a number of their innocent lives could have been spared.
How is it that someone who is giving the lethal injection isn’t committing murder? I wondered that too until I found that the person on death row is no longer considered living once sentenced to death row. But how can this make any sense when 1 in 8 people sentenced on death row is found innocent. That’s a lot of people who would have otherwise been thought of as dead. Another claim is that the lethal injection is painless. However, it’s impossible to know that because the drugs used in the injection first paralyze the person therefore making that person unable to communicate whether he or she is in pain or not. There have also been situations where it has taken 30 minutes for someone to die from lethal injection because the injector couldn’t find a good vain and the needle slipped out. That person sat in agony the whole time just waiting to die. If that’s not cruel and unusual punishment, I don’t know what is.
So as you can see, I am quite against the death penalty because a life for a life simply leaves the whole world dead.
