Why Is Death Penalty Wrong

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Death Penalty
Since 1976 there has been a total of 1448 executions in the United States. However there has been many executions before that. The death penalty has been used for thousands of years all over the world. Death for a crime is justified in cases of extreme murder, however they’re some people who believe it is inhumane and violates human rights.
The first person to be sentenced and executed is dated as far back as 18th century B.C. They then established the first laws for the death penalty in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for 25 different crimes, these crimes included adultery and helping slaves escape, however murder was not one of them. The death penalty has also been apart of the Fourteenth
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“Execution is the ultimate, irrevocable punishment: the risk of executing an innocent person can never be eliminated. Since 1973, for example, 150 US prisoners sent to death row have later been exonerated. Others have been executed despite serious doubts about their guilt. [The penalty] Does not deter crime. Countries who execute commonly cite the death penalty as a way to deter people from committing crime. This claim has been repeatedly discredited, and there is no evidence that the death penalty is any more effective in reducing crime than imprisonment.” (Amnesty International, 2017). Many people believe the death penalty punishes the poor, condemns the innocent to die, is not a deterrent to violent crime, is "cruel and unusual punishment, and that it fails to recognize that guilty people have the potential to change, denying them the opportunity to ever rejoin society. “The death sentence says some people are beyond redemption, beyond second chances, beyond being allowed to live in society. We disagree. We believe people deserve second chances. We actually think many people are on death row and in our prisons because they never got any first chances. Poverty, racism, neglect, violence and mental illness are all issues impacting who becomes a “criminal.” Countless prisoners have also transformed their lives, in spite of the horrific conditions behind prison bars that they are forced to endure. Executing those individuals or condemning them to die in prison denies their ability to fully participate and contribute in society.” (nodeathpenalty.org, 2017). One of the biggest reasons people are against the death penalty is because of “the record of false convictions for those who end up on death row provides no reassurance that innocent people are not being executed. In 1999, eight people were