Capital Punishment
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In the past few years, capital punishment has become a national issue in the United States. Many people have questioned the morality of the government executing human beings, while others have claimed that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent and should be discontinued. Both of these criticisms, however, fall far wide of the mark. Capital punishment is a vital component of our country's criminal justice system for three main reasons: it is a just way to punish those who do wrong in order to restore the balance to a just society, it is the only way to ensure that societal predators never harm innocents again by rendering them utterly incapable of doing harm, and, most importantly, it has a significant deterrent effect on those who would commit murder but do not out of fear of being executed. Additionally, we will show that those who argue that innocents are being put to death by the government are grossly misrepresenting the facts in order to advance their arguments. The bottom line is that the death penalty, properly administered in order to ensure that it is applied justly, is an essential component of America's criminal justice system. Abandoning it would be foolhardy at best and dangerous at worst. The first and most obvious argument for the death penalty involves the fact that the murder of an innocent is never deserved. Those who prey on unsuspecting members of society and murder innocent men, women, or children have earned their punishment through
. . .
ead of DPIC, Richard Dieter, admitted in an interview for the American Bar Association Journal that, in compiling this number, his organization does not distinguish between those prisoners whose convictions were overturned due to a legal error in their prosecution, and those who were released because they were proven innocent of the crime they allegedly committed (Sharp).
This is a vitally important distinction, because the terms of the national debate concerns the actual innocence of those sentenced to the death penaltyłnot the legal technicalities that can be used to free those who are in fact guilty. For example, after reviewing 23 death sentence cases that DPIC had alleged were problematic, the State of Florida's Commission on Capital Cases concluded that there were doubts as to the guilt of the convicted felon in only 4 cases. Nationwide, of the 101 cases that the DPIC claims were released from death row due to evidence of the felon's innocence, the actual number is closer to 30. Taking the long view, this means that of the 7,000 people sentenced to death since 1973, there are real doubts about the legitimacy of 30 of the convictions. "It appears that the death penalty may well be this country's most accurate criminal
. . .
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Approximate Word count = 1571
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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