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Death Penalty

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Death Penalty
Sheyla Paez
Mr. Mitchum
English 3
10 January 2012
Death Punishment or Capital Penalty According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “an estimated 15,269 Americans have been executed since the inception of the death penalty dating back to colonial times” (ACLU). Capital punishment is the most preeminent form of criminal punishment in the United States. By being expensive and racially and socially biased, the death penalty is only used for the government’s fear of executing innocent people. The Supreme Court should annihilate the capital punishment in order to preserve morality and abolish unfairness. Capital punishment is extremely expensive for taxpayers and it prolongs the victims’ families anguish. “In reality, capital punishment is a bloated government program that has bogged down law enforcement, delayed justice for victim’s families, and devoured millions of crime-fighting dollars that could save and protect the public” (Arkansas Abolish). Capital punishment has four essential steps, each step in the process are expensive and time consuming. The steps in the Capital punishment include: "Sentencing, Direct Review, State Collateral Review, and Federal Habeas Corpus" (ACLU). Death penalty process have to be reviewed over and over again because the U.S. government are afraid of prosecuting innocent people. "A recent tabulation by the Death Penalty Information Center showed that 138 prisoners were exonerated after being sentenced to death between 1973 and 2010" (Daly). The United States uses the death penalty 's long process in their favor to ensure that no innocent person is executed, or so they try to. Capital punishment has never been equalized across races, classes, and the mentally disabled, and it has not shown to decreased crime rate. "... Americans who support the death penalty do so because they want to believe that our justice system is just, and not merely a mechanism for quarantining the dangerous in order to keep the law-abiding safe


Cited: Brooks, Keith. Complete Summary of the New Testament. 19. Los Angeles: Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1919. 18-21. eBook. <http://biblia.com/books/nasb95/Dt19.18>. Daly, Michael "Wasteful and Inefficient." Arkansas Abolish. Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, 2010. Web. 28 Nov 2011. Williams, Richard
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