Abolish the Death Penalty Death Penalty The death penalty is a major issue
that brings up a lot of arguments in our society. The most important question
concerning the death penalty is whether it should be abolished or not. I think
that the death penalty is the ultimate denial of human rights. It violates the
right to life as proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It is the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment. Race, social and
economic status, location of crime, and pure chance may be deciding factors in
death sentencing. In addition, prosecutors seek the death penalty far more
frequently when the victim of the homicide is white than when the victim is
black. The actual cost of an execution is substantially higher than the cost of
imprisoning a person for life. Death was formerly the penalty for all felonies
in English law.
In practice the death penalty was never applied as widely as the law
provided, as a variety of procedures were adopted to decrease the harshness of
the law. Many offenders who committed capital crimes were pardoned, usually on
condition that they agreed to be transported to what were then the American
colonies; others were allowed what was known as benefit of clergy(Ploski 2).
The beginning of benefit of clergy was that offenders who were established
priests were subject to trial by the church courts rather than the non-religious
courts. If the offender convicted of a felony could show that he had be
ordained, he was allowed to go free, subject to the possibility of being
punished by the ecclesiastical courts. In medieval times the only proof of
ordination was literacy, and it became the custom by the 17th century to allow
anyone convicted of a felony to escape the death sentence by giving proof of
literacy(Ploski 4).
In 18th-century England concern with rising crime led to many statutes either
extending the number of offenses punishable with death or doing away with
benefit of clergy for existing felonies, which as a result became capital(Black
2). By the end of the 18th-century English criminal law contained about 200
capital offenses. Many offenders who were convicted of capital crimes escaped
the gallows as a result of reprieves and royal pardons, usually on condition of
transportation, and many others who were charged with capital crimes were
acquitted against the evidence, because the jury was unwilling to see the death
penalty applied in a minor case(Black 5).
The unpredictable application of the death penalty in the late 18th and early
19th centuries led to demands for humanitarian reform. Between 1820 and 1840
most capital statutes were repealed, and by 1861 only murder, treason, arson in
a royal dockyard, and piracy with violence retained the death penalty.
Until the mid-19th century executions in England were public, and throughout
the 18th century great crowds attended the regular executions in London and
other cities(Ploski 6). Often an execution was followed by scenes of violence
and disorder in the crowd. Public opinion eventually turned against the idea of
executions as spectacles, and after 1868 executions were carried out in private
prisons( Black 7). The earliest recorded execution committed in the U.S. under
state authority was in 1864.
