Death Penalty

3 Pages 654 Words

The Unites States is one of the only industrialized countries in the world that imposes the death penalty on its citizens. One of the flaws of the death penalty is that it is imposed on the poor more frequently because they can’t afford to hire adequate representation and must rely on public defenders that are, in most cases, over worked and under paid. Another problem with the death penalty is that innocent people are at risk of being put to death. There have been hundreds of cases where innocent people have been released from death row.
The death penalty in our country places innocent people at risk of being put to death. According to The American Civil Liberties Union, since 1976 more than 100 prisoners convicted of capital crimes and sentenced to death were released from death row with having strong evidence of their innocence. (ACLU) DNA tests played a major role in providing their innocence. Wrongful convictions often result from false confessions, which are frequent among juveniles and the mentally retarded, mistaken eyewitness evidence, jail house snitches, white collar fraud and prosecutorial abuse. (ACLU) While doing research for this paper I came across the story of Earl Washington. To make a long story short, Mr. Washington was mentally retarded and was sentenced to death in 1984 after falsely confessing to rape and murder of a woman in Virginia. DNA tests conducted after he was sentenced to death proved that he was not the rapist. Mr. Washington was ultimately released but not until after he served 16 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, for a crime he did not commit. (ACLU)
The death penalty is unfair to the economically challenged. I am going to share a quote from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, April 9th 2001. “I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming in which the defendant was well represented at trial… People who are well represented at trial do not get the death pena...