Thursday, May 15, 2008

Death Penalty

Do you believe that the death penalty should be used in situations as a punishment for wrong doing? The United States is one of seventy-eight countries in the world that use the death penalty as a sentence for crime. There have been complications regarding the penalty that cause a lot of unnecessary pain to the inmates. The death penalty should not be allowed for three reasons, and they are that it costs to much, inhumane ways of killing, and it is not helping lower the murder rates. The death penalty should not be allowed to be used in the United States.
The overall cost of execution is way to high. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a death penalty case ranges from one million to three million dollars per case. Although, life in prison averages around five hundred thousand dollars each. The government shouldn’t be paying that much for someone to die who did something really bad. They should have to suffer in prison every day, and reflect on how they hurt someone. The government especially cannot afford anymore executions because of the current slump they are in now. The overall cost of executing someone is way to high, which is why the death penalty should not be allowed.
The death penalty is a very inhumane way of killing someone. There has been many reports saying how things could go terribly wrong during the execution. Some victims have caught on fire, had violent spasms, heavy bleeding for their face, and even choking which prolong death. That is not even the disturbing part of why the death penalty is wrong. Thirty-eight out of fifty states allow the death penalty, which does not include Minnesota. They use five different forms of execution that is legal: lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas, firing squad, and hanging. Although, lethal injection is the most common of the execution types. The death penalty should not be allowed for the inhumane ways of execution.
Does the death penalty even work to prevent fewer murders in the United States? According to the Death Penalty Information Center, states that perform the death penalty have higher murder rates than states that don’t perform the death penalty. With this known information, why wouldn’t states get rid of the death penalty? Although, every execution results in about eighteen fewer murders, that isn’t enough fewer deaths for the cost of the penalty. It should be completely destroying all possibilities of murder, not just eighteen. The death penalty should be banned in the United States because it does not help that much to eliminate possible murders.
Although many Americans think that the death penalty is helping America become a much safer place, it really isn’t. The murder rate is not going down like it should by using the penalty. Plus, the cost of execution is way to high for our current government slump. Some may say that executing people gives them a taste of their own medicine for doing something horrible to someone else, but it really doesn’t. For all these reasons and many more, the death penalty should be banned in the United States of America.

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