Death Penalty 101

Welcome to Death Penalty 101:
Here are the main points of interest for today's class.

• Due to the stages of the capital crime process everything that takes place after the penalty phase trial and before the execution are in place to protect the rights of the accused. Technically the guilt phase and the penalty phase of the trial are also in place to protect the rights of the accused, but the technical defenition of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" has sort of disappeared these days and therefore does not protect the rights of the accused anymore. After the penalty phase you have all of the appeal phases including the direct appeal, the post-conviction review, federal habeus corpus, and the clemency phase, are all appeals that are there to make sure that the accused actually deserves to be sentenced to death. Those all are in place to insure that the right decision was made. Even though all those processes are in place to make sure that the right decision is made, there seems to still be the few innocent people being sentenced to death and some even receiving the death penalty. Therefore I still think that the system is a flaud system and that it is insufficient.
• Of the methods of execution used by the U.S. there is only one humane method. That is the execution by lethal injection. The reason that this is humane and the others are not is because this one is the one with no pain involved. The criminal is given an injection in each arm and it slowly puts them to sleep and then kills them. The other methods, those being hanging, fire squad, gas chamber, and electrocution, should all be considered cruel and unusual by definition of the 8th amendment. They all involve a painful death and therefore should be banned. Especially the execution by gas chamber, that is of too much resemblence of the Holocaust, and therefore should be the first abolished. All of them should be abolished but if there is one that were to stay, it should be lethal injection.
• I believe that when you want to look for a conclusion to come to about the death penalty you need to date all the way back to pre-Civil War to get the conclusion. It is still really the battle between the North and the South. It is no surprise that the states that have the most death row inmates and also the most executions are the states of the South. Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisianna are all in the top of the statistics when it comes to inmates and use. It tells us that the North will always be the North and that the South will always be the South. What I mean by this is that things will never change. Since the 1800s we have been fighting slavery and racism. It was thought to have been overcome after the North won the Civil War and Lincoln abolished slavery, it wasn't. It was thought to be overcome after the civil rights movement and after everyone was considered to be equal. Guess what... it wasn't. There is still racism that goes on, and you can see it in the judicial system, being that most of the inmates on death row are black, and that the states with the most inmates and most executions are the southern states (i.e. the one's who were in favor of slavery).
• In comparison to the demographics of the U.S. the number of blacks on death row, although less than whites, is still a higher percentage of their population. By this I mean that there are more whites in the U.S. then blacks but that the percentage of whites on death row to number of whites in America is less than the percentage of blacks on death row in comparison to blacks in America. In recent years the numbers in favor of the death penalty have decreased, the population is quickly turning against it. The reason for this is that people are finally realizing that the death penalty is actually costing them more money than holding them in jail. Since America is a country based on making and saving money, that is a huge determining factor is whether it stays or goes. The Death Penalty center is cleary against the death penalty being that is shows all the stats about money against the death penatly. It might be convincing to those who believe otherwise, but for those like myself who already know that the death penalty should be abolished, the facts are only reassuring. They should explain to people how holding the inmates in jail costs much less than when they convicted go through the appeals process and then the actual cost of the executions. It would make a very convincing argument.

That is all for this discussion, you are now dismissed from today's lecture on Issues in the American society. Tune in next time when I will be discussing the next topic that Mr. Kramer asks us to discuss. I have to get back to watching Sunday Night Football on NBC.