Why is death penalty abolished

Stats from the Death Penalty Information Center indicate that in the past forty years, there have been 1, executions in the South compared to just four in the Northeast, and yet homicide figures in were nearly 70 percent higher in the Southern states.

By abolishing the death penalty, we could focus our time, energy and resources on supporting victims and families harmed by violence. We must ensure that all victims are treated fairly and with respect. If you listen to victims speak about their experience with the death penalty, you find that virtually all are frustrated with the current system.

Moreover, all victims are not treated fairly. Survivors of homicide who oppose the death penalty report being treated like second-class victims by some prosecutors. Questions about the death penalty divide families needlessly. Further, there are stark disparities in how victims are treated based on race. A study by the Vera Institute in found that victim assistance services including treatment for trauma are routinely unavailable to young African American men.

Despite their ordeal, the system is more likely to treat African American men as perpetrators or even complicit in their victimization. We need to take the focus, attention and resources that the death penalty steals to focus our hearts and hands on creating a culture of healing and support for victims of homicide and violence. Our focus needs to be on preventing crime and violence. We know that to reduce crime and violence we must focus on the root causes of crime. Crime happens when other issues are neglected such as mental health, housing, access to education and sustainable employment options.

When these issues are addressed, communities become safe and vibrant, and when you look at those on death row in the United States, you see the costly evidence of neglecting children, families and communities at risk. The history of capital punishment in America clearly demonstrates the social desire to mitigate the harshness of the death penalty by narrowing the scope of its application.

Whether or not explicitly authorized by statutes, sentencing discretion has been the main vehicle to this end. But when sentencing discretion is used — as it too often has been — to doom the poor, the friendless, the uneducated, racial minorities, and the despised, it becomes injustice. Mindful of such facts, the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association including 20 out of 24 former presidents of the ABA called for a moratorium on all executions by a vote of to in February The House judged the current system to be "a haphazard maze of unfair practices.

In its survey of the death penalty in the United States, the International Commission of Jurists reinforced this point. Despite the efforts made over the past two decades since Gregg to protect the administration of the death penalty from abuses, the actual "constitutional errors committed in state courts have gravely undermined the legitimacy of the death penalty as a punishment for crime.

The ALI, which created the modern legal framework for the death penalty in , indicated that the punishment is so arbitrary, fraught with racial and economic disparities, and unable to assure quality legal representation for indigent capital defendants, that it can never be administered fairly.

Thoughtful citizens, who might possibly support the abstract notion of capital punishment, are obliged to condemn it in actual practice. Unlike any other criminal punishments, the death penalty is irrevocable. Speaking to the French Chamber of Deputies in , years after having witnessed the excesses of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette said, "I shall ask for the abolition of the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me.

Since , in this country, there have been on the average more than four cases each year in which an entirely innocent person was convicted of murder. Scores of these individuals were sentenced to death. In many cases, a reprieve or commutation arrived just hours, or even minutes, before the scheduled execution. These erroneous convictions have occurred in virtually every jurisdiction from one end of the nation to the other. Nor have they declined in recent years, despite the new death penalty statutes approved by the Supreme Court.

Disturbingly, and increasingly, a large body of evidence from the modern era shows that innocent people are often convicted of crimes — including capital crimes — and that some have been executed. He was convicted largely based on eyewitness testimony made from the back of a police car in a dimly lit lot near the crime scene. This sample of freakish and arbitrary innocence determinations also speaks directly to the unceasing concern that there are many more innocent people on death rows across the country — as well as who have been executed.

Several factors seen in the above sample of cases help explain why the judicial system cannot guarantee that justice will never miscarry: overzealous prosecution, mistaken or perjured testimony, race, faulty police work, coerced confessions, the defendant's previous criminal record, inept and under-resourced defense counsel, seemingly conclusive circumstantial evidence, and community pressure for a conviction, among others.

And when the system does go wrong, it is often volunteers from outside the criminal justice system — journalists, for example — who rectify the errors, not the police or prosecutors. To retain the death penalty in the face of the demonstrable failures of the system is unacceptable, especially since there are no strong overriding reasons to favor the death penalty.

Prisoners are executed in the United States by any one of five methods; in a few jurisdictions the prisoner is allowed to choose which one he or she prefers:.

The traditional mode of execution, hanging , is an option still available in Delaware, New Hampshire and Washington. Death on the gallows is easily bungled: If the drop is too short, there will be a slow and agonizing death by strangulation.

If the drop is too long, the head will be torn off. Two states, Idaho and Utah, still authorize the firing squad. The prisoner is strapped into a chair and hooded. A target is pinned to the chest. Five marksmen, one with blanks, take aim and fire.

Throughout the twentieth century, electrocution has been the most widely used form of execution in this country, and is still utilized in eleven states, although lethal injection is the primary method of execution. The condemned prisoner is led — or dragged — into the death chamber, strapped into the chair, and electrodes are fastened to head and legs.

When the switch is thrown the body strains, jolting as the voltage is raised and lowered. Often smoke rises from the head. There is the awful odor of burning flesh. No one knows how long electrocuted individuals retain consciousness. In , the electrocution of John Evans in Alabama was described by an eyewitness as follows:. Evans' body. It lasted thirty seconds. Sparks and flames erupted … from the electrode tied to Mr.

Evans' left leg. His body slammed against the straps holding him in the electric chair and his fist clenched permanently. The electrode apparently burst from the strap holding it in place. A large puff of grayish smoke and sparks poured out from under the hood that covered Mr. Evans' face. An overpowering stench of burnt flesh and clothing began pervading the witness room. Two doctors examined Mr.

Evans and declared that he was not dead. Evans was administered a second thirty second jolt of electricity. The stench of burning flesh was nauseating. More smoke emanated from his leg and head. Again, the doctors examined Mr. At that time, I asked the prison commissioner, who was communicating on an open telephone line to Governor George Wallace, to grant clemency on the grounds that Mr. Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.

The request …was denied. At , the doctors pronounced him dead. The execution of John Evans took fourteen minutes. The introduction of the gas chamber was an attempt to improve on electrocution. In this method of execution the prisoner is strapped into a chair with a container of sulfuric acid underneath. The chamber is sealed, and cyanide is dropped into the acid to form a lethal gas. Execution by suffocation in the lethal gas chamber has not been abolished but lethal injection serves as the primary method in states which still authorize it.

In a panel of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California where the gas chamber has been used since ruled that this method is a "cruel and unusual punishment. A few seconds later he again looked in my direction. His face was red and contorted as if he were attempting to fight through tremendous pain.

His mouth was pursed shut and his jaw was clenched tight. Don then took several more quick gulps of the fumes. His face and body turned a deep red and the veins in his temple and neck began to bulge until I thought they might explode. After about a minute Don's face leaned partially forward, but he was still conscious.

Every few seconds he continued to gulp in. He was shuddering uncontrollably and his body was racked with spasms.

His head continued to snap back. His hands were clenched. At this time the muscles along Don's left arm and back began twitching in a wavelike motion under his skin. Spittle drooled from his mouth. Approximately two minutes later, we were told by a prison official that the execution was complete.

District Court , S. The latest mode of inflicting the death penalty, enacted into law by more than 30 states, is lethal injection , first used in in Texas. It is easy to overstate the humaneness and efficacy of this method; one cannot know whether lethal injection is really painless and there is evidence that it is not.

As the U. Court of Appeals observed, there is "substantial and uncontroverted evidence… that execution by lethal injection poses a serious risk of cruel, protracted death…. Even a slight error in dosage or administration can leave a prisoner conscious but paralyzed while dying, a sentient witness of his or her own asphyxiation. Heckler , F. Its veneer of decency and subtle analogy with life-saving medical practice no doubt makes killing by lethal injection more acceptable to the public.

Journalist Susan Blaustein, reacting to having witnessed an execution in Texas, comments:. Nor does execution by lethal injection always proceed smoothly as planned. In "the authorities repeatedly jabbed needles into … Stephen Morin, when they had trouble finding a usable vein because he had been a drug abuser. Although the U. Supreme Court has held that the current method of lethal injection used is constitutional, several people have suffered because of this form of execution.

In Ohio, Rommel Broom was subjected to 18 attempts at finding a vein so that he could be killed by lethal injection. The process to try to execute him took over two hours. Finally, the governor had to stop the execution and grant the inmate a one week reprieve.

Nor was he the only Ohio inmate so maltreated. The state had amended its injection protocol to use a single drug, propofol, which advocates say causes severe pain upon injection. Although similar suits are pending in other states, [15] not all protocol-based challenges have succeeded; in Texas and Oklahoma, executions have continued despite questions about the potential cruelty of lethal injection and the type or number of chemicals used.

Food and Drug Administration FDA —are now the subject of federal litigation that could impact the legitimacy of the American death penalty system. Most people who have observed an execution are horrified and disgusted. In my face he could see the horror of his own death. Revulsion at the duty to supervise and witness executions is one reason why so many prison wardens — however unsentimental they are about crime and criminals — are opponents of capital punishment.

Don Cabana, who supervised several executions in Missouri and Mississippi reflects on his mood just prior to witnessing an execution in the gas chamber:. It has been said that men on death row are inhuman, cold-blooded killers.

But as I stood and watched a grieving mother leave her son for the last time, I questioned how the sordid business of executions was supposed to be the great equalizer…. The 'last mile' seemed an eternity, every step a painful reminder of what waited at the end of the walk. Where was the cold-blooded murderer, I wondered, as we approached the door to the last-night cell.

I had looked for that man before… and I still had not found him — I saw, in my grasp, only a frightened child. I don't want to do this anymore. They do their best to perform the impossible and inhumane job with which the state has charged them. Those of us who have participated in executions often suffer something very much like posttraumatic stress.

Many turn to alcohol and drugs. For some individuals, however, executions seem to appeal to strange, aberrant impulses and provide an outlet for sadistic urges. Warden Lewis Lawes of Sing Sing Prison in New York wrote of the many requests he received to watch electrocutions, and told that when the job of executioner became vacant.

Public executions were common in this country during the 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the last ones occurred in in Kentucky, when 20, people gathered to watch the hanging of a young African American male. Delight in brutality, pain, violence and death may always be with us. But surely we must conclude that it is best for the law not to encourage such impulses. When the government sanctions, commands, and ceremoniously carries out the execution of a prisoner, it lends support to this destructive side of human nature.

More than two centuries ago the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria, in his highly influential treatise On Crimes and Punishment , asserted: "The death penalty cannot be useful, because of the example of barbarity it gives men. Such methods are inherently cruel and will always mock the attempt to cloak them in justice.

Goldberg wrote, "The deliberate institutionalized taking of human life by the state is the greatest conceivable degradation to the dignity of the human personality. Capital appeals are not only costly; they are also time-consuming. The average death row inmate waits 12 years between sentencing and execution, and some sit in anticipation of their executions on death row for up to 30 years.

In solitary confinement, inmates are often isolated for 23 hours each day without access to training or educational programs, recreational activities, or regular visits. Such conditions have been demonstrated to provoke agitation, psychosis, delusions, paranoia, and self-destructive behavior. When death row inmates successfully appeal their sentences, they are transferred into the general inmate population, and when death row inmates are exonerated, they are promptly released into the community.

Death Row Syndrome gained international recognition during the extradition proceedings of Jens Soering, a German citizen arrested in England and charged with committing murder on American soil.

Justice, it is often insisted, requires the death penalty as the only suitable retribution for heinous crimes. This claim does not bear scrutiny, however. By its nature, all punishment is retributive. Therefore, whatever legitimacy is to be found in punishment as just retribution can, in principle, be satisfied without recourse to executions. Moreover, the death penalty could be defended on narrowly retributive grounds only for the crime of murder, and not for any of the many other crimes that have frequently been made subject to this mode of punishment rape, kidnapping, espionage, treason, drug trafficking.

The abolition of the death penalty is a highly symbolic cause, which highlights the universality of human rights. The death penalty is not a useful instrument for combating crime. The loss of life in which it results is irreparable and miscarriages of justice can occur in all legal systems.

The death penalty is not simply a criminal justice policy instrument, but a violation of human rights. Its application is forbidden by numerous international texts in French. Global support for abolition is increasing on all continents, regardless of political regimes, development levels or cultural legacy.

We are currently observing a downward trend in the number of death sentences and executions worldwide. The death penalty was abolished in France under the Act of 9 October which was born of the commitment of Robert Badinter, Minister of Justice at the time, and his speech before the National Assembly. Tomorrow, thanks to you, French justice will no longer be a justice that kills. Tomorrow, thanks to you, there will no longer be, to our common shame, stealthy executions, at dawn, under the black canopy, in the prisons of France.

Tomorrow, the bloody pages in the history of our justice will have turned.