Capital Punishment

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Capital Punishment

                In my opinion, the strong arguments for imposing the death penalty outnumber the arguments against it.  For starters, it is a good mental threat to prevent people from committing horrible crimes such as murder.  Also, it helps with the prison overcrowding problem, as people that would otherwise stay there for the rest of their lives would just be removed.  As these felonies are often very easy to prove to a jury, these terrible people would no longer be a part of society, giving the public some peace of mind.

                I recently visited the department of corrections in my town in a youth leadership program, and the district attorneys explained to us that there are so many crimes committed every day that many criminals are given shortened sentences and early departure from prison in order to have enough space.  As there are budget cuts in almost every company and program throughout the country, most cities and communities cannot afford to build more housing for criminals.  As some are doomed to prison for life, many of them would rather just have their life ended than to spend their miserable existence in prison.

                Some people are just so crazy that it wouldn’t make a difference, but most people would be very quickly scared out of committing a crime if they knew that death would be a possible consequence.  Primitive as they may seem, executions have always been a warning to society to follow the rules and behave.  This is still the case today in places where capital punishment is legal.  Also, the current method of death penalty, the lethal injection, is hardly unconstitutional and has been ruled to be in sync with the right against cruel and unusual punishment in the Constitution. 

                Despite the numerous good arguments in favor of capital punishment, there is one thing that keeps me from agreeing with it.  This is the fact that if the death penalty were legalized, an innocent person would be executed sooner or later.  Taking the life of a person that has been wrongly accused of a crime is totally unacceptable, and I believe that this is enough of a reason to disallow the death penalty.  Also, I don’t think that humans should be able to decide whether someone deserves to die.  For these reasons, I am against the death penalty, as I want it to be impossible for an innocent person to be executed unjustly.