Death Penalty and Sentence Severity Writing Prompt
Among the existing types of punishment, the death penalty is the most severe. The person is to commit something really horrible in order to be sentenced in this way. When thinking of this issue, one question arises – how many innocent people were sentenced to death? US Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) gives an answer. As for me, justice will never reach its ideal form; mistakes will regularly take place – that is why, unfortunately, death penalties will be still applied to the innocent people. In this aspect, the issue of its elimination is undoubtedly worth taking into consideration.
According to the data provided by the DPIC (n.d.), from 1973 till now 159 people were wrongfully sentenced to such form of punishment. Personally, I feel that such a tendency show the imperfection of the modern justice. It is human beings who deliver the final decisions and it is normal for them to make mistakes. The most crucial thing is to provide the condition that prevents the possibility of the existence of the biased judges. In this case, there is no justification for the wrongful decisions. Fortunately, the judicial system is multistage that decrease the possibility of convicting the innocent people.
Turning to the point of the nature of human being, it is absolutely impossible to make the judicial system a perfect one. People are not robots – there were the mistakes, they take place now and they will still occur. Hence, it seems justified to think over the proposition of abolishing such type of punishment due to such a high rate of wrongful convictions. “In the interests of protecting fundamental and universal human rights, Amnesty International is committed to the complete elimination of the death penalty worldwide.” (Amnesty International, 1998, p. 37). Such a step will at least prevent the unlawful decisions that may lead to the death of the innocent human.
To sum up, the presented data forces to consider the idea of abolition of this very type of punishment.
Works Cited
Amnesty International. “USA: Fatal Flaws: Innocence and the Death Penalty”. Amnesty International. 12 November 1998. Web. 30 May 2017.
Death Penalty Information Center. “Innocence Cases”. Death Penalty Info. n.d. Web. 29 May …
