Abolish The Death Penalty

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Abolish The Death Penalty

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 unpredi...

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