Period 2
Social Commentary Essay
It will never be acceptable to kill innocent people, yet it happens all too often. In the American television series Dexter, the main character of the same name lives to satisfy his father 's "code" by killing terrible criminals who deserve death for continuing to get away with murder. Dexter executes the guilty with precision and with assurance that they deserve it. Throughout the episodes, this piece of literature argues that only those truly guilty of malicious crimes towards society deserve a just death (Dexter). Our country claims that capital punishment is justifiable because they claim to only kill those truly guilty of crimes. Nothing is more extreme than taking a life, so it is important …show more content…
The argument that it is only acceptable to kill someone if they truly deserve death for their actions is prominent in the television series Dexter, however this does not hold true in our country today in regards to the death penalty due to lack of evidence, lack of fair trial, and unjust reasons for killing. If any criminal is sentenced to death in this country, it is first and foremost because of sufficient evidence of their actions, yet whether the accused truly deserves death each time remains to be seen in the U.S., as opposed to Dexter. The T.V. series Dexter constantly shows that you must have proper evidence to kill someone. In the Pilot episode of Dexter, the main character surveys a murderer who escaped imprisonment due to a faulty search warrant by police. He breaks into his home to find proof of his crime. Once Dexter confirms he is guilty by seeing videos of girls being raped by the murderer, Dexter captures him, and the man then admits that he killed a woman and has zero remorse for what he had done (Dexter). Here it is evident that the suspect deserved death: he continually abused women and even murdered one, and there was clear proof of his actions. The …show more content…
Such mistakes that have been made must be prevented for the future, so that the innocent don 't continue to suffer. In fact, the Innocence Project, an organization that emphasizes the faults in our death penalty system, states that the inmates falsely accused of their crimes "...were convicted in 11 states and served a combined 209 years in prison – including 187 years on death row – for crimes they didn’t commit." (Innocence Project). To be exonerated after years and years must leave unfathomable mental trauma. If that many innocent people have been forced to wait on the edge of death for this long, it wouldn 't be hard to believe that some won 't be lucky enough to be saved from the mistakes of our unacceptably inefficient court system. Killing a person, even sentencing them to death, is only just if they truly deserve it. That is what Dexter argues, yet our country continues to ineffectively implicate capital punishment by making the innocent suffer through unnecessary torture. We must end capital punishment, or at least make it more efficient. There are lives at