The Pros And Cons Of Capital Punishment

Submitted By stefrivera052707
Words: 1682
Pages: 7

Since 1930, more than four-thousand five-hundred people have been executed in
UnitedStates. This type of punishment is so controversial that has been discussed among people every day, the death penalty, an ongoing debate, is an acceptable punishment, in which criminals are given a chance to a quicker and immediate death; however, there’s also people with opposing views who believe that the capital punishment is unfair and is the same as murdering the person.

Currently, there are thirty-four states in America that still use the death penalty. The kind of punishment they enforce includes the electric chair, hanging, lethal injection, firing squad,and the gas chamber. However, there are a few of them that are now not used, because they cancause a greater amount of pain or sometimes a danger to others before the criminal is actually killed.
One example of this is the gas chamber; the start of the use of gas chambers was put in place after World War I. The procedure of this punishment has the criminal strapped onto a chair and then hydrogen cyanide gas is pumped into the chamber, this gas cuts off the oxygen that travels to the victims brain. Though the victims are previously instructed to take deep breaths when the gas is released, the victims often take about ten minutes to fully die. Not only is this a very slow process to have someone die, there is also the precaution that if the gas chamber was not sealed tight enough, the poisonous air would leak out, and possibly kill an innocent person. This concludes to why the gas chamber is now not accepted as a capital punishment, along with hanging. Many citizens argue that the death penalty is an unfair punishment in United States.
They say that it does little to stop murderers, and can oftentimes harm innocent people.

Although many proponents might argue about the quote “an eye for an eye” obviously states that the capital punishment should be an appropriate ruling in our country, the opponents declare that this would lead to “the world going blind”. Moreover, if the point of the death penalty is to get the world out of the criminal’s harm path, then life imprisonment can also take the criminal out of the society. Additionally, the sentence of death is very frequently raciest in the way that blacks get ruled the capital punishment more than the whites. However, there are still some who states that the death penalty is favorable in the United States. The proponents state that executing criminals will directly help stop the criminal rate in America; also, they declare that when the criminals that are sentenced are killed, the world is one less a murderer than before. Adding on, the argument that the wrong person would be killed is very slim; as a matter of fact, with the development of technology constantly evolving, the chances of the wrong citizen being executed are also constantly decreasing. Although many opponents state that the capital punishment is racist, there are statistics that more African-Americans do crimes than
Caucasians. Teddy Roosevelt, a well-known political figure known to many people, said “I have always felt impatient contempt for the effort to abolish the death penalty on account of sympathy with criminals. I am willing to listen to arguments in favor of abolishing the death penalty so far as they are based purely on grounds of public expediency. . . . But inasmuch as, without hesitation, in the performance of duty, I have again and again sent good and gallant and upright men to die, it seems to me the height of a folly both mischievous and mawkish to contend that criminals who have deserved death should nevertheless be allowed to shirk it. This quote explained means that Roosevelt, although will take time to listen to the criminals, still believes in the use of capital punishment. One ruling that involved the death penalty is Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. In this case, Troy