Capitol Punishment

On April 22, 2005, the decomposing bodies of 23-year-old Christian Melcher and 11-month-old Jaiden Melcher were discovered stuffed inside a plastic storage container in her home. A plastic bag covered the head of the small child. An autopsy later revealed that Christian Melcher died of strangulation or asphyxiation. Over the past few years, the nation has struggled with a number of moral and practical questions related to capital punishment. Is capital punishment a racially bias system? Is capital punishment humane? And is there a way to bring justice to those who commit such capitol punishment worthy crimes? Controversial cases have dominated headlines for years but yet we have still not come to a unified conclusion as a country.

Some say the death penalty should be abolished. 21-year-old Brett Robinson claims, “The death penalty should be abolished because of many reasons. Many people believe the saying, “an eye for an eye”. But when will people realize that just because someone may have killed a love one, the best thing for that person is not simply for the murderer to die also.”

Saleh-Hanna, a contributor to the book “The Case for Penal Abolition” did some research and found that, “evidence has shown that most prisoners are poor, they come from minority populations and have faced great discrimination and racism in the community both before they committed their crimes and during the criminal justice process.” This statement begs the question is capital punishment a way to slowly exterminate the lower class? Interestingly the book Death Penalty Cases states “Leading U.S Supreme Court Cases on Capital Punishment, Death-penalty opponents respond that the race card plays a role in other ways. When a defendant has been convicted of killing a white person the odds that the defendant will be executed by the state are much higher. Eighty-five percent of those who have been executed since 1976 were convicted for killing a white person, while only 13% were executed for killing a black person.”

For instance, the 1972 Furman V. Georgia case abolished the death penalty for four years on the grounds that capital punishment was extensive with racial inequalities. Over twenty-five years later, those inequalities are higher than ever. The statistics says that African Americans are twelve percent of the U.S. population, but are 43 percent of the prisoners on death row. Although blacks make up 50 percent of all murder victims, 83 percent of the victims in death penalty cases are white. Since 1976 only 10 executions involved a white defendant who had killed a black victim. In all, only 37 of the over 18,000 executions in this country's history involved a white person being punished for killing a black person. A Georgia study found that killers of whites are 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than killers of blacks. More than 75 percent of those on federal death row are non-white. Of the 156 federal death penalty prosecutions approved by the Attorney General since 1988, 74 percent of the defendants were non-white (governmentguide.com). When given these statistics 20-year-old Jordan Crafton of Baldwin N.Y stated, “this shows that there is something deathly wrong with the judicial system. If this isn’t enough to convince you that the death penalty is wrong I don’t know what will. Are we realizing that as a society we are putting the blood of another person life on our hands by simply allowing this to go on? ”

The death penalty does not only show unequal rights, but it also punishes the poor. It shows in recent studies that if an inmate can afford good legal representation, they are more likely can receive a lesser charge than death row. It also shows that 90 percent of defendants cannot afford to hire an experienced criminal defense lawyer. Since they cannot afford to hire one, they are forced to use inexperienced court-appointed attorneys that are being underpaid for their services. The less the court-appointed attorneys make,