The Death Penalty Is Wrong Essay Example

The death penalty is absolutely outrageous. There is no real reason that the government should feel that it has the right to execute people. Capital punishment is murder just as much as the people being executed murdered. The is no need for the death penalty and it needs to be abolished. It goes against the Constitution which states that there will be no cruel and unusual punishment. There is nothing crueler than killing a person. A perfect example of the death penalty going awry is the state of Illinois. Former governor George Ryan has put a stay on all executions. This came as a result of finding thirteen death row inmates not guilty of their convicted crimes. Also, by staying executions, Illinois is not spending the three hundred million dollars to almost three hundred men and women to death row in the past twenty two years (Ryan 14). That is a ridiculous amount of money to send only three hundred to death row, making it approximately one million dollars a person. Those people make up only two percent of all convicted murders in Illinois (Ryan 14). This leaves ninety eight percent of killers in jail. Why are only three hundred people acceptable to kill when the other ninety eight percent are not? In New York as well, prosecutors have only sought capital punishment in twelve out of one hundred ninety eight possible cases. They have found that the penalty of life without the chance of parole works well, and have come to prefer it (Shipp). Without the philosophy of life without parole, inmates who are tried for the death penalty are tried unfairly. In the year 2000 in Illinois, eight out of ten inmates sentenced to capital punishment were minorities (Mendieta).
"Minority inmates constitute 83% of those who have thus far been shown to be wrongfully convicted." One study has shown that people who murdered white people were found more likely to be sentenced to death than people who have murdered African Americans (The Death Penalty is Wrong. Dead Wrong).