The past month in sociology class we have been learning about crime and punishments. I recently was involved in a mock Supreme Court case that we did for our final project. My teacher choose two of the class-members to be lead attorney's, with three judges, and the rest of the class was splite on either side of the issue. The issue was capital punishment with one side having to argue for it and the other against it. I was choosen as one of the lead attorney's and a girl in my class who is extremely vocal with her liberal views was the other. My teacher knew my oppinion on the death penalty, that I was for it, and the other girl was against it, so he had me be in charge of the side against it and her on the side for it.
At first I was not happy about his decision, but I am know glad he did that. I lost the court case in the end, but I learned a lot about how both sides of an issue can have ligitimate arguments even if one is truly better than the other. My teacher is really good at teaching in a way that doesn't reflect his personal oppinion (which happens to be mostly opposite of mine) and he knows I am interested in history and politics, so he pushes my brain.
Here is the paper I wrote up against the death penalty. It was hard because it was not my point of view.
“Whatever else might be said for the use of death as punishment, one lesson is clear from experience; this is a power that we cannot exercise fairly and without discrimination.”
-Justice William O. Douglas, Furman v. Georgia (408 US 238)
For these reasons and those that follow we stand firmly against the resolution that capital punishment is Constitutional and should be used in the United States.
Contention 1: Capital Punishment is dispersed unequally and in a discriminating manner making it a violation of the Constitution of the United States.
Constitutional processes and elementary justice both require that sentencing should be conducted in fairness regarding race and gender. Many times courts have sentenced some individuals to prisons while others have been sentenced to death based off of bias and racism. Between the years of 1930 and 1996, 4,200 prisoners were executed in the United States with “more than half (53%) [being] black.” Over the past century, before capital punishment was declared only for 1st degree murder, 455 men were executed for rape with 405 of those executed being black. Also, the fact that from 1977 and 1995, out of 313 individuals 36 had been convicted of killing a black person while 249 had killed white person proves that the death penalty is applied unequally. (http://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/case-against-death-penalty) These statistics show that those who kill whites are more likely to be given the death penalty compared to those who kill racial minorities.
Race is not the only factor in which the death penalty is applied unequally. The execution numbers of women compared to the numbers of 1st degree murder shows that women are less likely to be executed than men. While women are arrested for murder 10% of the time they are only executed for murder 1% of the time. (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/women-and-death-penalty#facts ) Compared to their crimes women are much less likely to be executed for their crimes than men making the death penalty unequal in that respect.
Unequal punishment dealing with the death penalty is made even more unequal because of the fact that many of the people accused of capital crime are poor and can not pay for a substantial lawyer. The 90% of individuals accused of capital crime are then given a public defendant who has no real reason to continue appeals because of the cost to the taxpayers he works for. In the end the accused does not receive competent council in defending his right to life.
Contention 2: The simple fact that capital punishment is more expensive than life imprisonment is enough to discontinue the use of the death penalty in the United States.
Murder trials take much longer and expel more funds when the death penalty is the issue rather than life imprisonment. In Maryland between 1979 and 1984 a death penalty case cost “approximately 42 percent more than a case resulting in a non-death sentence.” Similarly, in Florida, a state with one of the biggest death rows in the United States, the cost of one execution is $3.2 million or in other words six times the cost of a life-imprisonment sentence. (http://users.rcn.com/mwood/deathpen.html) The fact that defendants can file numberless appeals also adds to the cost of the death penalty. Death penalty defendants cost taxpayers billions because they are usually defended by a lawyer who is paid for by the state. A death penalty case in California has been going on since 1989 when a 24 year old serial killer, Richard Ramirez, began his appeals. Experts suspect that he is “only about halfway through the appeals process” ending with his execution. If that process continues Ramirez “won’t be put to death until he is 71 years old-if he lives that long.” (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/03/22/california-killers-sit-symbolic-death-row-decades-costing-billions/) The amount of taxpayer dollars spent on executions and the legal expenses leading up to them far exceeds the amount of money required for an individual to be placed in life-imprisonment.
Contention 3: Capital punishment has all but disappeared in the civilized world and is Unconstitutional in the United States.
Throughout the civilized world the death penalty has been rid of as a way to punish murderers. The United States is one of the few “civilized” countries to still use capital punishment. Under Amendment VIII, attached to the Constitution, no “cruel and unusual punishments” should be inflicted. The killing of an individual is cruel and the fact that capital punishment is not used in most civilized nations makes it unusual in our United States. This amendment helps define capital punishment or the killing of another human being as Unconstitutional.
In the end “[t]he death penalty brings neither peace nor healing to the uninjured parties and the resulting upheaval and re-victimization at all levels of its implementation have far greater consequences than are ever brought to light. As a society, we have to decide; do we perpetuate a system of punishment that is of questionable social value and can never be perfected, or do we remove its traumatizing impact from our criminal justice system altogether? The answer will in large measure define who we are as a people.” –Bill Jenkins, Father of Murdered Victim
So with these arguments we stand firmly against the resolution that Capital Punishment is moral, legal, and most of all that it should be used for justice in the United States.
