Death Row
What interested me the most about Darlie's case was the extremity of her punishment. It is quite clear that Darlie could not have been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, yet she was still put on Death Row. To look deeper into the death penalty and compare Darlie's case to a similar one, I looked into Daniel Wozniak's case.
Wozniak was working as an actor in Orange County when he was accused of shooting and decapitating two of his closest friends. His motivation: he was broke and needed to pay for his wedding and honeymoon. He was arrested only hours before his wedding, and he attempted suicide a few days after his arrest (due to shame.) He testified as not guilty and sat waiting for his court date for over a year. This case is extremely similar to Darlie's case. So, when these people were not, in my opinion, convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, why should it be legal to sentence them to death.
Obama has said himself "In the application of the death penalty, we have seen significant problems." When the President says that the way of the land has significant problems, it usually means that the system is seriously messed up. But, the Supreme Court says that the death penalty is Constitutional because they do "painless" procedures for execution, and when sentenced to life in prison you become a "slave" to the state. I believe it is unconstitutional because there have been 312 exonerated deaths due to the introduction of DNA testing. And the National Academy of Science predicted that 4% of Death Row inmates are actually innocent. With statistics like these, it is unjust to sentence people to death because it is impossible to know that every single one if them is deserving of the sentence. It is also a huge waste of tax payers' money to kill criminals. It costs about 10 times more to give someone the death penalty (after battling it out in court and proceeding to Death Row) than is does to just put them in prison for life.
These statistics don't even touch the concept of institutionalized racism in our legal system, nor the fact that there have been accidents in the killing process where the person could feel their death.
For these reasons, I deem it morally and ethically wrong to sentence someone to death for their crimes.
Wozniak was working as an actor in Orange County when he was accused of shooting and decapitating two of his closest friends. His motivation: he was broke and needed to pay for his wedding and honeymoon. He was arrested only hours before his wedding, and he attempted suicide a few days after his arrest (due to shame.) He testified as not guilty and sat waiting for his court date for over a year. This case is extremely similar to Darlie's case. So, when these people were not, in my opinion, convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, why should it be legal to sentence them to death.
Obama has said himself "In the application of the death penalty, we have seen significant problems." When the President says that the way of the land has significant problems, it usually means that the system is seriously messed up. But, the Supreme Court says that the death penalty is Constitutional because they do "painless" procedures for execution, and when sentenced to life in prison you become a "slave" to the state. I believe it is unconstitutional because there have been 312 exonerated deaths due to the introduction of DNA testing. And the National Academy of Science predicted that 4% of Death Row inmates are actually innocent. With statistics like these, it is unjust to sentence people to death because it is impossible to know that every single one if them is deserving of the sentence. It is also a huge waste of tax payers' money to kill criminals. It costs about 10 times more to give someone the death penalty (after battling it out in court and proceeding to Death Row) than is does to just put them in prison for life.
These statistics don't even touch the concept of institutionalized racism in our legal system, nor the fact that there have been accidents in the killing process where the person could feel their death.
For these reasons, I deem it morally and ethically wrong to sentence someone to death for their crimes.
I agree. I feel that a life sentence in prison should be the biggest punishment for someone who commits a big crime such as murder. But I also feel that it should depend on the family who's affected and it should partially be their choice as well
ReplyDeleteI agree with you and I think it's very interesting that it cost more money to kill someone via the death penalty than it does to keep them in prison for life. I think that through the death penalty the justice system risks killing innocent people and the people who are guilty get away with not having to spend the rest of their life in prison. Personally, I would much rather take the death penalty than life in prison because then you don't have to reflect on your crime but if you're in prison you'll face what you did eventually.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that the death penalty is morally and ethically wrong, especially considering the potential for wrongful convictions. I was curious about the number of states that still have the death penalty and was surprised to find out that 31 states do still have the death penalty, meaning only 19 states (and D.C.) have abolished it. However, some states have not actually executed death row inmates in years- for example, although California has continued to sentence people to death and has the largest death row population of all the states (which makes sense because it is the most populous state), California's last execution was in 2006. Some states also have a governor-imposed moratorium, such as Pennsylvania, where Governor Wolf referred to capital punishment as "error prone, expensive and anything but infallible" in 2015. Article 2 below from Business Insider refers to a 2016 study by Harvard researchers that concluded that only a relatively small number of counties, called "outlier counties", actually account for most of the country's use of death penalty.
ReplyDeleteSources
1. https://deathpenalty.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=001172
2. https://www.businessinsider.com/states-with-the-death-penalty-america-2018-3
3. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/02/13/pa-governor-imposes-moratorium-on-death-penalty.html
4. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/6360
I disagree with the death penalty completely because of the cost for taxpayers. I think that our taxpayer dollars should go towards educating outselves rather than murdering someone for them to forget about what they did. Life in prison without a possibility of parole is really a worse punishment than death....
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