Understanding of Death Penalty

Should the Death Penalty be Abolished?
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Should the Death Penalty be Abolished?
Over 60% of the world’s population lives in countries that still practice capital punishments CITATION Cor16 \l 1033 (Corteen, Morley, Taylor, & Turner, 2016). While the practice is widely spread, it has sparked heated debates, and over the last century, more countries have increasingly come out against it. The supporters of the death penalty cite that it is a deterrent to crime and reasonable retribution for some crimes such as murder. However, the reasons to abolish the death penalty outweigh the reasons for it. Thus, the death penalty should be abolished because it has been proven that it is not a crime deterrent and that some innocent victims may lose their lives because of the flaws of the criminal justice system, and it has been used disproportionately by some governments for relatively small crimes. Therefore, irrespective of the arguments for the death penalty, it should be abolished.
One of the main reasons the death penalty should be abolished is that it is irreversible, and some innocent people may be wrongly accused and end up losing their lives. The United States is one of the countries in the West that have the death penalty. According to CITATION Rob21 \l 1033 (Dunham, 2021), ‘1534 people have been executed, and 185 exonerated from death in the United States since 1970.’ That means 1 in every 8.3 people have been exonerated. At such a rate, there must be innocent people who have been murdered by their governments. Some people have been exonerated posthumously, which highlights execution as a flawed punishment. While their names may be cleared, their lives have been taken by their governments. The irreversibility of death is one of the most compelling reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. The criminal justice system is not perfect, and many times it puts innocent people behind bars and eventually on the electric chair for crimes they never did. There have been reports of forced confessions, mishandling of evidence, corrupt prosecutors, and many other reasons showing that the existing criminal justice system is marred with injustice. Since we know that the criminal justice system is flawed, we should not have an irreversible penal action. In the last few decades, at least 18 people have been found innocent and exonerated after serving time on death row CITATION Inn09 \l 1033 (Innocence Project, 2009). In other cases, it is impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the death row inmate was guilty of the crime. Troy Davis was executed even when there was an individual who had confessed to the murder of the victim, and several witnesses recanted their testimonies, citing that the prosecutorial team compelled them to give false witness accounts. Many of those exonerated have been lucky because of new evidence or technology to prove their innocence. Thus, such a flawed system should not be given the power to take lives because its actions are irreversible.
Secondly, studies have shown that capital punishment is not a deterrent to crime CITATION Mug20 \l 1033 (Jouet, 2020). Crime rates have remained somewhat unchanged with or without the death pena...