Death Penalty Paper - Introduction

@5752
ENGL P050 CRN 32356
Professor Jacinto Gardea
4 April 2011
"Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life," said Coretta Scott King. Yet to this day we continue to carry out death executions. In the United States a death row convict is executed every 3.5 days (Barry par.4). I believe that the death penalty needs to be abolished from the United States because it is costly, ineffective, and outdated. According to the online newspaper The Guardian, the United States has executed approximately 1,156 people in the time period of 1976 to April 2009 (Rogers). Do not forget to include the 107 people executed from 2009 up until this year. We, as humans, are prone to make mistakes and this system is capable of causing irreversible results. Many innocent people have been executed because they were in the minority or because they lacked funds to pay for adequate representation. The Death Penalty Information Center explains that since 1976 there have been eight cases which reveal that the prosecuted persons were innocent after they were executed. Even if we do choose to go through processes to make sure that the person was one hundred percent guilty it would still bombard our taxpayers with a ridiculous amount of money to pay for the court costs. Ironically, states that do not use the death penalty often usually have lower crime rates than states that do. The question remains. Why does the United States continue to waste millions of dollars on this obsolete system? All of this money should be put into more beneficial services, such as abuse prevention programs, education, and public safety programs. Former Los Angeles district attorney Gil Garcetti told Los Angeles Times:
The money would be far better spent keeping kids in school, keeping teachers and counselors in their schools and giving the juvenile justice system the resources it needs. Spending our tax dollars on actually preventing crimes, instead of pursuing death sentences after [they have] already been committed, will assure us we will have fewer victims (California's Death Penalty).

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