Abolish The Death Penalty

Below is a short sample of the essay Abolish The Death Penalty. If you sign up you could be reading the rest of this essay in under two minutes. Registered users should login to view the essay.

Abolish The Death Penalty

Death Penalty
The death penalty is a major issue that brings up a lot of arguments in our society.
The most important question concerning the death penalty is whether it should be
abolished or not. I think that the death penalty is the ultimate denial of human rights. It
violates the right to life as proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is
the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment. Race, social and economic status,
location of crime, and pure chance may be deciding factors in death sentencing. In
addition, prosecutors seek the death penalty far more frequently when the victim of the
homicide is white than when the victim is black. The actual cost of an execution is
substantially higher than the cost of imprisoning a person for life.
Death was formerly the penalty for all felonies in English law. In practice the
death penalty was never applied as widely as the law provided, as a variety of procedures
were adopted to decrease the harshness of the law. Many offenders who committed
capital crimes were pardoned, usually on condition that they agreed to be transported to
what were then the American colonies; others were allowed what was known as benefit of
clergy(Ploski 2). The beginning of benefit of clergy was that offenders who were
established priests were subject to trial by the church courts rather than the non-religious
courts. If the offender convicted of a felony could show that he had be ordained, he was
allowed to go free, subject to the possibility of being punished by the ecclesiastical courts.
In medieval times the only proof of ordination was literacy, and it became the custom by
the 17th century to allow anyone convicted of a felony to escape the death sentence by
giving proof of literacy(Ploski 4).
In 18th-century England concern with rising crime led to many statutes either
extending the number of offenses punishable with death or doing away with benefit of
clergy for existing felonies, which as a result became capital(Black 2). By the end of the
18th-century English criminal law contained about 200 capital offenses. Many offenders
who were convicted of capital crimes escaped the gallows as a result of reprieves and
royal pardons, usually on condition of transportation, and many others who were charged
with capital crimes were acquitted against the evidence, because the jury was unwilling to
see the death penalty applied in a minor case(Black 5).
The unpredictable application of t...

The complete article is about 1439 words and 5.76 pages long.

To continue reading the complete article, subscribe below and get free instant unlimited access.

Once you have registered for an Account, No refunds can be issued.
Please make sure you look over the site before you purchase an account!!!