Our Government Is Killing People In Our Name.
The Death Penalty — aka Capital Punishment: There is no nice way to say it. The death penalty is cold-blooded, premeditated taking of a person’s life — sometimes called murder in the first degree. The people who are committing this murder are the citizens whose government carries out the penalty — you and me. The criminal being penalized (murdered, or as we euphemistically refer to it — executed) was convicted of committing an egregious offense, typically in some deranged state of mind. We the citizens, on the other hand, are hopefully not in a deranged state. We have deliberately, with malice-aforethought, decided to kill someone. The trial process is flawed and sometimes convicts and condemns innocent people. “As of January 2020, the Innocence Project has documented over 375 DNA exonerations in the United States. Twenty-one of these exonerees had previously been sentenced to death. The vast majority (97%) of these people were wrongfully convicted of committing sexual assault and/or murder.”[1]
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights reports:
“If you are poor, the chances of being sentenced to death are immensely higher than if you are rich. There could be no greater indictment of the death penalty than the fact that in practice it is really a penalty reserved for people from lower socio-economic groups.”[2]
People are not executed for being poor, but being poor statistically increases their risk. What makes this situation even more tragic is that the death penalty does not work. Go to the Amnesty International website and click on “Death Penalty Facts.”
“Know the Facts About Capital Punishment[3]
Capital punishment does not work. There is a wealth of mounting evidence that proves this fact.
The death penalty, both in the U.S. and around the world, is discriminatory and is used disproportionately against the poor, minorities, and members of racial, ethnic, and religious communities. Since humans are fallible, the risk of executing the innocent can never be eliminated.
Furthermore, the astronomical costs associated with putting a person on death row — including criminal investigations, lengthy trials and appeals — are leading many states to re-evaluate and re-consider having this flawed and unjust system on the books.”
There are so many things wrong with this situation. We need to do away with the death penalty.
[1] https://innocenceproject.org/
[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2017/10/death-penalty-disproportionately-affects-poor-un-rights-experts-warn#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20you%20are%20poor%2C%20the,from%20lower%20socio%2Deconomic%20groups.
[3] https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/
