The Death Penalty in American Culture
...he U.S. Supreme Court, it could force judges to throw out capital punishments against the roughly two dozen federal death row inmates in the nation. A lawyer from the Vermont Law School; Michael Mello believes that this new ruling will eventually bring about the abolishing of capital punishment nationwide. Speaking of nationwide, to this date starting in the early nineteen twenties, nine hundred thirty five people have been killed by the state for their death penalty sentences. That number slowly climbs every year with the year two thousand and four having one of the lowest death penalty rates in over thirty years at fifty-nine people killed. The number of people sentenced to death row is also at the lowest it’s been in over thirty years at only one-hundred and thirty people condemned to die this year. Some people blame the death row population drop on exonerated inmates which totaled twelve people last year and five individuals this year. Convicts on death row are usually exonerated for a number of reasons. The most common reasons for wrongful convictions are mistaken eyewitness testimony, the false testimony of informants and “incentives witnesses,” incompetent lawyers, defective or fraudulent scientific evidence, prosecutorial and police misconduct, and false confessions. In more recent years, DNA has played a role in overturning twelve wrongful death row convictions. As a nation we are divided on the issue of capital punishment statutes. In total thirty six states are for the death penalty and fourteen are not for it with Illinois just having reversed it’s death penalty status. Illinois recently dropped its death penalty statutes because cold case detectives have un-earthed new evidence that proves that many of the people they have executed over the years were entirely innocent. In addition New York’s Supreme Court has decided that the death penalty is an infringement on a civilian’s constitutional rights. Furthermore New Jersey is beginning to question the humaneness of its methods of execution and for that is putting all its death penalty cases on hold for the time being. Here in the great state of Vermont we haven’t had the death penalty in over fifty years. States are continuously rethinking their death penalty statutes, as I had mentioned before Illinois has recently overturned its death penalty because they have discovered that they have murdered over six innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit. There are many good reasons to get rid of the death penalty forever, to wipe the literal blood off our hands for eternity; however there are also some good reasons to keep it an integral part of our criminal justice system. One of the strongest arguments that can be made in favor of the death penalty is that there are less people on death row then there have been in over thirty years, there are also less people being executed every year. This seems to show that the fear factor of being killed for committing a heinous crime is effective. However, to counter that argument; the reason why there are less people on death row and less people being put to death is because more and more states are exonerating prisoners for being falsely accused of their crimes, or for having faulty trials that were unfair and prejudice in some cases. A good argument that rejects capital punishment reverts back to exonerations. Think of how many people that could have been falsely accused of their crimes, if last year and this year were any example that means since the early twenties some four hundred and forty innocent people could have been put to death on the basis of faulty evidence, but how will we ever know, those people are all dead now. Switching directions, I’ll now talk on behalf of myself and articulate my views on capital punishment in the United States. First and foremost I am against the death penalty, the dissenting opinion of the United States, but the majority opinion in Vermont. I am against the death Penalty for three main reasons. The first reason is that capital punishment teaches the citizens of this nation that killing a convict for killing a person or number of persons justifies those murders. This way of teaching the people is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to deter would be violent criminals. I don’t feel that a person should grow up in a community that teaches them that revenge is okay and that the person who is avenging the murdered party gets the full support s/he needs from our government. The second reason why I feel the death penalty is wrong is because the methods of execution are severely inhumane and contrar...