Capital Punishment: A Look Into The Flaws Of The Death Penalty

11 Pages 2728 Words

t common arguments against the death penalty are related to the use of cruel and unusual punishment as a means of execution. This paper looks into the technical flaws of capital punishment, such as; why African Americans are increasingly the majority of death row inmates, why many of the criminals sentenced to death are of the lower class, why the death penalty fails as a deterrent, and why more men are later being found innocent. This paper will utilize these issues, through the use of information gathered from the Internet, to help support the serious flaws of capital punishment. Hopefully, based on the information I provide, these injustices of capital punishment will be understood more thoroughly.

Literature Review
Given the allotted time for my research I found that the fastest way for me to gain information on the death penalty was by using secondary data. The internet proved to be the most useful tool in gathering my information with literally thousands of websites pertaining to the death penalty all that need to be done was select which information best suited my purpose.
Sites such as The National Coalition To Abolish The Death Penalty, found at www.ncadp.org, although it is clear that this site holds a bias to the death penalty, it has provided recent statistics on the death penalty as a deterrence, executions of innocent men, and the executing of minorities. In reference to capital punishment as a failing deterrence, this website suggests that states with the death penalty have higher rates of murder, stating that the average murder rate per 100,000 people in states with capital punishment is about 8%, while it is only 4.4% in those states without it. They continued by showing that in California, between 1952 and 1967 there was an average of one execution every two months. From 1968 until 1991 there were no executions. The homicide rate was twice as high in the earlier period than in the latter. Based on the informatio...