Death Penalty

Through statistics, newspaper articles, internet findings and information from the US General Accounting office today I am going to persist in convincing my target audience that the death penalty is not a part of the correctional system . I will begin with a quote by Richard Dieter, an executive director from the death penalty information center, "The punishment of criminals by society is for the protection of society from punishment. But since such treatment is directed to the criminal rather than the crime, its great object should be his moral regeneration. The state has not discharged its whole duty to the criminal when it has punished him, nor even when it has reformed him. Having raised him up, it has further duty to aid in holding him up." The death penalty is the pole opposite of that approach. Once a person has been executed, there is no more "raising him up," nor "holding him up." This brings us again to my claim that the death penalty is not a part of the correctional system. I would suggest that it is much more a part of the political system. Today I will speak on four points 1) Who receives the death penalty 2) How some are innocent 3) The costs of the death penalty and 4) The victims.

Who receives the death penalty

Many people believe the death penalty is necessary: According to my survey more than 75% of you believe the death penalty is effective and that there are some criminals who are just so terrible, some criminals that are just so dangerous, and some criminals that are just so irredeemable that execution is the only way of dealing with them. Who are the people we subject to capital punishment? Are they really the "worst of the worst"? The evidence does not even remotely support that argument. There are too many murders in this country, but the death penalty is not designed to address that problem. According to Deathpenaltystatistics .org few people who commit murder are ever sentenced to death, and even fewer are executedÐ'--less than 1% who murder are executed. Who are in this select group? To begin with, those who receive the death penalty are far more likely to have murdered a white person than a black person. In over 80% of the cases of those executed in this country, the victim was white, even though blacks are victims in 50% of the murders in the U.S. Why do the lives of those victims not merit the death penalty? In study after study, I have found that according to the U.S. General Accounting Office, the consistent conclusion was that the race of the victim is a determining factor in who receives the death penalty. What does that say to society? It says that, when it comes to the death penalty, white lives are more valuable than black lives. Race plays a decisive roleÐ'--and we should not be executing anybody under such a system. Now that we've looked at Who receives the death penalty lets take a look at my second point how some are innocent.

The most disturbing fact about who gets sentenced to death in America is that some of those people are innocent. Since the death penalty was reinstated, over 100 death row inmates have had their convictions overturned. Over half of these reversals have occurred since 1990. This is not a problem that is going awayÐ'--the system is human and fallible. Mistakes can happen anywhere in the criminal justice system, but with the death penalty they bury their mistakes. And with so many mistakes revealed in recent years, they should not be executing anyone. If the death penalty were an assembly line, and it produced defective products that were endangering people's lives, the factory would be closed; and the products would be recalled. Here's a true story of a boy named Anthony Porter that I found in Chicago Sun Times. Porter was scheduled to be executed in September 1998 in Illinois. Porter was mentally retarded and his attorneys successfully asked the judge for a hearing to determine whether he was competent enough to be executed. With this long delay waiting execution, there was an opportunity for a journalism class at Northwestern University to take Porter's case as an investigative exercise. The students assigned to Porter's case tried to re-enact the scene of the crime, but the description from the trial would not match the real scene. They next contacted one of the witnesses. Amazingly, she admitted that she had lied about Porter at his trial. Moreover, she led the students to the actual killer, who eventually confessed to the crime on videotape. Porter was freed from death row in Illinois, walking out into the