Why the Death Penalty Should Be Abolished

Since the beginning of time we have used some pretty horrific ways to torture, punish, or kill people. We have used Chinese Water Torture so that you mentally go insane as they continue to drop a single drop of water on your forehead so that either you go mentally insane or die from the tip of your skull caving in. We have used hanging people on crosses so that you either die from starvation, suffocation, or they would cut your legs off and you would bleed to death. We have used burning people at the stake, which explains itself by the name alone. I am not even going to mention the Holocaust or any sort of war. Now we usually do not see these kinds of torture tactics to punish people ever again, but in our recent times there is one form of death that is still around, the electric chair. Now this way to kill someone does not sound as bad as past tactics, but it is still a brutal way to kill someone. I mean you are strapped down to a chair while you know you are waiting for your own death to happen, and then you are electrocuted until you die. Now being strapped down like an animal is not humane, and it only grows as a fear and punishment in our society. We also use lethal injection which is another fancy way to say you are killing someone. The death penalty system that we use today has made a fear in our society that says, "If you do something bad enough to a certain degree, then we will take your life without a care in the world." People fear enough today in our society with the problems of crime, poverty, war, economic downfall, human rights, etc; the death penalty should not be added to that list. I also believe that the death penalty sends out a message of punishing people the easy way. If they did a crime so inhumane to our society, and damaged the lives of so many then let them spend the rest of their lives in prison. If prison is as bad as people say, then wouldn't you rather have them suffer in jail, and make them feel some sort of pain, like pain they caused you when they killed one of your loved ones? Or would you rather have them die without some sort of pain or regret. I mean some people would make the world a better place by dying. But not everyone. This quote explains deeply why the death penalty should be abolished, "If it is wrong for people to take life, then it is wrong for the state to take life." This asks how can we enforce some sort of law that tells us if we kill someone or do a crime that is equal to that nature, then we will punish you the exact same way that is known in our society as something not to do, but apparently it is okay, because the government is only doing their job to keep our country "Safe and Secure." That only proves that as a nation, we allow ourselves to twist these sort of laws and morals in our society to our advantage, and contradict ourselves into a hypocritical action. Our death penalty system is not a punishment to our prisoners that receive it, but it is only a punishment to our society that sends out a message that "Killing someone is a good thing as long as it is okay with our government." But I am not the only person who feels this way. I took it upon myself, not only for research in my paper, but to make a stronger argument. I asked twenty people (ten men and ten women) if the death penalty should remain and still be used as a way to kill people; or if it should be abolished, and never used no matter what the stature of the crime was. 80% said that the death penalty should be abolished, because there should be no punishment that gives the government some sense of power of how you live or die. 10% said no, because they believe that the death penalty creates a high power of authority, and security over our country. The remaining 10% were undecided. Most people believe that the death penalty is wrong. You cannot make a law that tells you that your country can possibly take your life, because of committing a crime that you did. I mean you have to ask yourself, does the death penalty even work overall? Even though we have killed so many people in our past by the death penalty, people continue to commit crimes, and murder innocent people. I mean people are dying every day still, so how is the death penalty exactly working? I mean our government continues to kill guilty men for murder, that killed someone before they were killed, but then we go through that same sort of "problem and solution" that our country has grown adapt to. In my opinion this is just too much killing!