The Death Penalty- should it be brought back? (Capital punishment)

Name: madchillie

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Product:	Capital punishment
Date:	09.04.07 (1988 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An effective form of punishment

Disadvantages: Not at all ethical

Imagine a man whose hair is shaved off. He is being strapped to a chair with belts that cross his chest, groin, legs and arms. A metal skullcap-shaped electrode is attached to the scalp.

Then imagine a man pulling a handle. Suddenly the prisoner’s eyeballs begin to pop out and rest on his cheeks. He defecates, urinates, vomits blood and drools. As 2000 volts surge through him, his body turns bright red. His flesh swells, his skin stretches so much that it looks as if it will snap. Then imagine steam or smoke rising from his body, the smell of burning flesh, like bacon on a frying pan…

Then imagine that this man is innocent. That he was wrongly accused. That he should never have suffered such a painful death.

I believe that Capital Punishment is wrong, that it is primitive and inhumane and that it should never, no matter the circumstances, return to Britain.
Imagine the grief of Laura Mattan. Her husband Mahmood was executed in Cardiff jail in 1952 after being wrongly convicted of slitting a woman’s throat. Imagine how his widow felt when she went to visit him in jail and discovered he had been hanged by a heartless notice pinned to the prison door. Imagine the shock and disgust she must have felt. No one had the decency to inform her that her innocent childhood sweetheart had suffered this terrible fate.

Put yourself in Mahmood’s position, being dosed up with brandy and having your shaking hands tightly strapped behind your back with a leather belt. Desperately aware that no one can save you, you slowly follow the hangman to the gallows. The hangman grabs you and pulls a white cotton hood over your head. You may be unable to see, but you can hear their voices penetrating the air and feel them positioning the noose tightly around your neck whilst someone straps your ankles together. There is silence. You hold your breath, eyes tightly closed, finches clenched. This is the end.

You have to remember that Mahmood did nothing wrong. He was innocent. In September 1996, Mrs Mattan won the first court battle to clear her husband’s name when she was permitted to have his body exhumed from its felon’s grave in Cardiff jail and reburied. Mahmood never had a chance to say goodbye to his wife. He suffered the death of a murderer. Nobody should have to bear the same fate that he did.

The death penalty is all about revenge - it symbolises a backward society, one that is bloodthirsty and goes by the rules of the dark ages.
You can never be 100% certain that somebody is guilty. Some people would disagree, they would say that with knowledge of DNA, how can somebody be wrongly convicted? If that is the case, then how do they explain the statistics that since 1973, 122 prisoners have been released in the USA after evidence emerged of their innocence of the crimes for which they were sentenced to death.

In this time of foolproof technology there were six such cases in 2004 and three up to December 2005. Other US prisoners have already been killed despite serious doubts over their guilt.

Does the death penalty honestly seem safe anymore when so many people have had their lives taken away? Their innocent lives? Even if the person is guilty, we have no right to kill them. What makes us any better than them, if we too commit murder? We would only be copying the very crime that society condemns, by allowing murderers and criminals to set the standard for the whole of society.

Capital punishment should never return to Britain. We are lucky to be British. We can live in a country where Capital Punishment does not exist. In fact, when Britain effectively abolished the Death Penalty in 1965, she was saving a lot of innocent men and women from death.

Take Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Patrick Armstrong and Carole Richardson, better known as the Guildford Four. They were accused in October 1975 of being part of the Provisional IRA and behind the Guildford pub bombing. After 15 years it finally emerged that they, in fact, had nothing to do with the IRA or the bombing. They were innocent. Had the death penalty existed still in Britain, the Guildford Four would be long dead.
Some people may ask whether it is necessary to execute certain prisoners in order to prevent them from repeating their crimes?

Unlike imprisonment, the death penalty can never be corrected. There will always be a risk that some prisoners who were innocent will be executed. The death penalty will not prevent them from repeating a crime which they did not commit in the first place.

It is also impossible to determine whether those executed would actually have repeated the crimes of which they were convicted. Execution entails taking the lives of prisoners to prevent hypothetical future crimes many of which would never have been committed anyway. It negates the principle of rehabilitation of offenders.

There are those who argue that imprisonment alone has not prevented individuals who have been imprisoned from offending again once set free. The answer is to review the parole procedures. It is certainly not to increase the number of executions. People need rehabilitation; if they offend again once they are let out off jail, then they obviously didn’t receive the medical treatment that they needed.
The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. It violates the right to life. Statistics have proven that States in America WITH the death penalty have the same crime rate as states WITHOUT the death penalty. It obviously does nothing to deter people from committing crimes and so why is it still allowed? In 1976, the death penalty for murder was abolished in Canada. Since then, the homicide rate has dropped by 44%.

Capital Punishment should never happen. Innocent people die and accidents can occur, making their deaths even more appalling than before. For example, in 1983, Jimmy Lee Gray was sentenced to asphyxiation. Officials had to clear the room eight minutes after the gas was released, when Gray’s desperate gasps for air repulsed witnesses. He died banging his head against a steel pole in the gas chamber while the reporters counted his moans. It was later revealed that the executioner was drunk. Should it be allowed for people to die in such horrific circumstances?

The system, apart from being backward, is also very corrupt. Currently on death row in the United States, 41.7% of prisoners are Black compared to 45.5% who are White. However, the proportion of Black people living in America is much smaller than the proportion on death row. Why is this?
Black people suffer under institutionalised racism. Because of the way the system works, black people suffer. The determining factor is that generally Black people are poorer than White. They therefore cannot afford good lawyers and have to rely on public defenders.

In 2001, US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said:

‘People who are well represented in trial do not get the death penalty…I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial.’

This is true. Many men on death row are there because they had poor lawyers- in fact, their representation has been atrocious. Lawyers have been known to turn up drunk, to have only looked at the documents on the day of the trial. George McFarland who is still on death row in Texas, had a lawyer who slept through parts of his trial.

How can this system be fair when the people who escape death are the ones who are rich, not those who are innocent? Like OJ Simpson, a black American football star who most definitely did commit the murders he was accused of but got away because he had money.

Another example of the corruption that the system faces is of the use of the death penalty against child offenders – people under 18 at the time of the crime – is clearly prohibited under international law, yet a handful of countries persist with child executions.

For example, the USA has carried out 19 executions on child offenders – more than any other country. Take Napoleon Beazley, who was executed in 2002 in Texas for a murder committed eight years earlier when he was 17 years old.

At the trial the white prosecutor described him as an “animal” in front of the all-white jury. Witnesses at the trial cited his potential for rehabilitation. He was a model prisoner. And yet he was killed.

How can this be allowed? The whole system is messed up.

A famous case that occurred recently was the death of Stanley Tookie Williams. A member of a dangerous gang and accused of murder, Williams was sentenced to death.

In 1997, Williams wrote and posted an apology. In 2004 he helped broker a peace agreement what had been one of the deadliest and most infamous gang wars in the country. He worked to dissuade youth from joining gangs and was reportedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

This man repented. He could have repaid his crimes and done a lot of good. However, when he filed for clemency, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, refused it. He wanted to look politically strong but did not listen to his conscience. Williams was completely rehabilitated, he was no longer a danger to society; he could have gone out and been a force for good.

Despite all this, on the 13th of December, Stanley Tookie Williams was executed via lethal injection.

Life is a precious gift- we have no right to take it away.

Britain took the correct steps when it abolished the death penalty. In morals and humanity, we are miles ahead of countries such as America, who still harbour Capital Punishment.

The methods used, such as the electric chair, hanging, firing are already too horrendous. Executions add to the glorification of violence that already exists too much in our society.

Death is irreversible. People are still being wrongfully killed. Anything that involves even one error like that is unacceptable.

The death penalty brings us down to the same level as the murderers. To see why it should never be brought back, you only need a conscience.

Mervyn Mattan, whose father had been wrongfully hanged once said that:

‘The piece of my father that they have given back to me is in the form of a financial award. But that money cannot buy back his soul. They stole my father’s life and no amount of money can change that.’

Is the death penalty really worth it? Remember what Mahmood, Jimmy Gray and Stanley Williams died for.

Nothing.

That is why the death penalty should never EVER return to Britain.

Summary: Just my opinion, please don't attack me too much in the comments! :s