Death+Penalty+1+Cons

Nathan Meyer

The Death Penalty is a criminal sentence used in the US. But there are many downsides to using the death penalty.

The first major downside to the death penalty is that people believe that it violates the 8th amendment. The 8th amendment is that there can be no cruel or unusual punishments in the US. People find this cruel in that the pain it produces is cruel, and it is unusual because it treats people like objects that can be discarded,and not like a human being. An arument against it that ties into it's unconstitutionality,is the that it is inhumane to kill someone for a crime. People believe that even if they commited a felony like murder, the killing of the accused person is wrong because it treats them like, once again, an item that can be discarded at the will of the government. One of the main purposes of the death penalty is that it works as a deterrent to other criminals, but people belive that it isn't that much of a threat. What this means this is that, as a deterrent, the death pently isn't as "scary" as Life in Prison, so people want to get rid of it because its not a whole lot more effective. Another major argument with the death penalty is that it is very problomatic. A lot of people worry that if the ivestigation isn't completely right, they could convict an innocent person. A recent study by the columbiea University Law School found that two thirds of all capital trials cantained serious errors. When the cases were retried, over 80% of the defendants were not sentenced to death and 7% were completely acquitted. This shows that there are a lot of death penalty involving cases that accuse innocent people. One of the largest arguments against the death penalty is that it is a racial biased system. This means that the cases that would use the death penalty would ususally convict a person with a foreign heritage rather than a normal american. And the final argument is that it attacks lower income people. People say that if you have a good or high income, you can afford a good attorney to get you out of the death penalty, vrs someone with a lower income who can't afford a good attorney, and end up with the death penalty.

The arguments of the death penalty are based off of opinion, but what are some solid facts about the death penalty?

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