Capital Punishment Should be Abolished

Evidence suggests that the death penalty does not deter people from committing crimes. It is a cruel and cold blooded form of punishment and there have been instances where innocent people were sentenced to death and later found to be innocent.

The most common methods of execution are hanging and shooting. Countries like the U.S. use electrocution, gas chambers and lethal injections to dispose of the convicted. Some countries, like the U.S., have tried to minimise the pain of execution by introducing the electric chair. In some parts of the world, more pain is deliberately inflicted on the condemned, such as in the Islamic countries and Nigeria. In Nigeria the executions are done in public by a …show more content…

Delay is also what makes capital punishment less of a deterrent, because it minimizes the chances of a convicted criminal ever being executed. Usually when a person is sentenced to death, it would take years until he/she would be executed. In the U.S. it takes an average of three years for, a so called capital case, to work its way up to the highest court. If an appeal is made it would delay the execution by five to ten years. "Willie Francis, 17, survived a sub-lethal shock from the electric chair in 1946. It took another year for him to be executed."3 This kind of delay would not be likely to deter many other criminals. A study made in the U.S., of death row inmates has found that 62 percent were unskilled workers, 60 percent were unemployed and a majority of these people were represented by lawyers with less than five years experience. Clifton
Duffy, former warden of San Quentin Prison in California, and others have testified that capital punishment is "a privilege of the poor." People who are inadequately represented are more likely to lose their case and this is what makes capital punishment unfair because poor people are more likely to be sentenced to death than rich people.

Murder cannot be cured by murder. The death penalty is cruel, inhumane and above all irreversible. It does not deter and isn't as effective as life imprisonment. Hugo A.