Hard to kill a wrongly convicted criminal

Edward Laijas:

Another reason that many people are against the death penalty is that they feel that innocent people will be wrongfully executed all in the name of justice. This is not true at all. There are many safeguards guaranteeing protection of the rights of those facing the death penalty. These safeguards are:

  1. " Capital punishment may be imposed only for a crime for which the death penalty is prescribed by law at the time of its commission.
  2. Persons below eighteen years of a age, pregnant women , new mothers or persons who have become insane shall not be sentenced to death.
  3. Capital punishment may be imposed only when guilt is determined by clear and convincing evidence leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts.
  4. Capital punishment may be carried out only after a final judgment rendered by a competent court allowing all possible safeguards to the defendant, including adequate legal assistance.
  5. Anyone sentenced to death shall receive the right to appeal to a court of higher jurisdiction.
  6. Anyone sentenced to death shall have the right to seek pardon or commutation of sentenced.
  7. Capital punishment shall not be carried out pending any appeal, recourse procedure or proceeding relating to pardon or commutation of the sentenced.
  8. Also capital punishment shall be carried out so as to inflict the minimum possible suffering." (5)
These safeguards will insure that justice will be served without having it suffer. Also these safeguards ensure that the death penalty is racially bias.


Jon Manning:

Every year approximately 250 new offenders are added to death row. In 1994 there were 2,850 persons awaiting execution. Yet no more than thirty-eight people have been executed a year since 1976. This is a ridiculously low number compared to 199 persons executed in 1935 (all from Cole 451). The reason for this slow execution rate is the process of appeals, from sentencing to execution there is about a seven to eight year wait. The convict's cases' are reviewed by the state courts and through the federal courts (Cole 451). With all this opportunity for the case to be turned over or the sentence to be changed it is almost impossible for an innocent person to be executed. Only two people have been proved innocent after their execution in the United States. These wrongful deaths occurred in 1918 and 1949 (Death Penalty Discussion). Since then the justice system has undergone a lot of fine tuning making this extremely unlikely today.


Abel Martinez:

How is the death penalty a punishment that fits the crime? Well, not every prisoner deserves the death penalty. People who kill someone in self defense should not be treated as one who kills just for the sake of killing. This is one instance anti-death penalty supporters will bring up. The criteria for evaluating whether or not a person is sentenced to death varies from state to state. The states that have death penalty laws are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming. The choices of execution are: hanging, electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, and lethal injection (BJS 12-92). These also vary from state to state. There are guidelines that are followed before a prisoner is sentenced to death. Of those, one of the most important reads: Capital punishment may be imposed only when guilt is determined by clear and convincing evidence leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the fact (Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch 5-25-84).


Jessica Spinler:

Despite the moral argument concerning the inhumane treatment of the criminal, we return to the "nature" of the crime committed. Can society place an unequal weight on the tragically lost lives of murder victims and the criminal? This is not an exam question in a college philosophy course but a moral conundrum at the core of perhaps the most intriguing issue facing the U. S. Supreme Court today. Punishment is meted out because of the nature of the crime, devoid of any reference to the social identity of the victim. Compassion and political calculation have combined to transform victims and their advocates into a potent lobbying force. Beginning in California, 1987, the Supreme court carved out a crucial exception: Neither the life of the victim nor the suffering of his survivors could be a factor in any state or federal case punishable by death (Shapiro, 61). The catch is that every reduction in the elaborate legal process that has evolved to ensure that only the guilty die increases the chances that an innocent person, victim, will be subjected to this most irreversible and final of punishments, injustices. The possibility of an innocent person being put to death is another factor some people have against the death penalty. According to the 1987 Stanford University survey, at least 23 Americans have been wrongly executed in the 20th century (Kramer, 32).


Jana Wofford:

An automatic appeal has been instituted in 35 of the 36 death-penalty states in an effort to reduce the amount of time spent by the court's appeal system reevaluating capital cases.(Capital Punishment 1992) Mandatory appeals shorten the length of time spent on death row and therefore could not be considered cruel and unusual punishment, although some opponents of the death penalty argue that appeals themselves are a form of torture as they keep inmates on death row for many years. This argument is contradictory because they also assert that there is a possibility of executing an innocent person. With no appeal, the chance of freeing a falsely convicted felon is also decreased. They cannot make this argument because arguing against mandatory appeals in that they bog down the system defeats the purpose of their argument against killing an innocent person. There must be a balance between these concepts two and to argue one side or the other is illogical. Though this logic may seem twisted, mandatory appeals expedite the execution process, which is currently an average of 9 years and 6 months on death row before the sentence is carried out.(Capital Punishment 1992)