Death Penalty #3

The stages in a capital case are very in depth and provide areas where the accused have the ability to provide a case for themselves. Also, this process protects the rights of the accused by allowing a clemency process, which guarantees that the person is in fact guilty. I think that the system displayed on the website is sufficient to make sure the guilty are convicted but not all systems are perfect. The possibility that an innocent person gets convicted or a guilty person is found innocent is probable.

If a person is to be sentenced to death, I believe that the most humane way to execute somebody is by lethal injection. This way harms the person the least and automatically kills them. I think that many of the options listed are very inhumane such as hanging because this causes the person to struggle and feel a significant amount of pain before he or she dies. I also think that a firing squad is a very inhumane way of executing a person.

This website is a very useful tool in order to see how the death penalty is used throughout the country. Some trends that I noticed were that mostly men are being executed and very few women were executed. I also noticed that more white people were executed than black people. I found this very interesting because I thought that this was the opposite. I found it interesting that the states that do not have the death penalty are more grouped together.

This data confirmed my previous observations and the issue of race is very important when looking at the death penalty. More white people are executed than blacks and the victims in the cases are predominately white. The issue of discrimination is prevalent in cases and many people use this as an argument during clemency. I think that this article is more biased towards not having the death penalty because it provides numerous examples of how the death penalty is flawed or wrong. For example, it provides a poll of how many people believe the death penalty deters more murders and the majority of people believe it does not. If the author of the article were in favor of the death penalty than they would not include this information.