Capitol Punishment

When it comes to capitol punishment I am strongly against it. I am against it because it is the killing of another human. Capitol punishment does not solve anything. When a murder kills someone the police want to take them to jail, and put them on death row. Once you get put on death row they do everything in their power to put you to death as fast as they can. Capitol punishment to me is just the killing of people. You put a murder on death row just so that the warden can kill them. Instead of just letting them sit in jail and think about the murder that they committed.

In the year 1999, thirty states and the Federal prison system held three thousand five hundred and twenty seven prisoners under sentence of death. In 1999 three hundred and twenty five Hispanic inmates under sentence of death accounted for ten percent of inmates with a known ethnicity. The youngest inmate on death row was seventeen in 1999, and was put to death at the age of eighteen. (Capitol Punishment, 1999).

When people think of capitol punishment they think the only way to make a murder suffer is by killing them. That is not hurting them at all, the only person that might be hurting is the family. I believe the best way to make a murder suffer is by making them sit in prison for life. Yes they may live an easy life, but they will have to think about the person that they killed every single day that they are alive.

More than two thousand people died while in police custody between the years 2003- 2005. As many as fifty four percent of inmates were killed by police. Twelve percent of jail inmates died because of drug or alcohol overdose, and eleven percent committed suicide while in jail serving their time. (Capitol Hill).

Among the one thousand and ninety five inmates killed by police and other security forces, eighty percent were armed, sixty two percent threatened police officers, thirty six percent made an attempt to escape, and eighteen percent were under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Among the two hundred and thirty four suspects who committed suicide, more than half were detained for violent crimes. Two-thirds killed themselves with firearms in the course of their arrest. Meanwhile, others hanged themselves in detention cells. (Capitol Hill).

So as you can see putting someone to death on your own is not always necessary. If you let a murder think about what they did for a long time they will soon regret doing the killing. If they think about the murder they did they will most likely kill themselves. That's why I say killing someone is not always the best answer.

Another reason why I am against capitol punishment is because it kills more people that are innocent then it does the people that are guilty. You can kill an innocent person in 2000 and not even know they were innocent until 2003. By the time you find out that they were innocent it is too late, because you already killed them and you cannot bring them back to life. Wealthy defendants can hire a battery of legal experts to defend themselves, while poor defendants must relay on a court appointed public attorney. The ones that have public attorneys are most likely the innocent ones but go to jail because their case was not presented that well by a public attorney. (..:namespace prefix = st1 ns