A Modern Argument Against the Death Penalty

Explore The argument for Abolition

Daniel Lee. Lezmond Mitchell. Kieth Nelson. Wesley Purkey. Alfred Bourgeois. Dustin Honken. William LeCroy. Christopher Vialva. Orlando Hall. Lisa Montgomery. Brandan Bernard. Corey Johnson. Dustin Higgs. Those are the names of thirteen prisoners killed by lethal injection during the Trump Executions. Prior to their rushed and violent executions, the U.S. federal government had not carried out a single execution in almost twenty years (Hale; Karvosky).

Instead of protecting these prisoners’ constitutional rights, the Supreme Court submitted to the bureaucratic will of the Trump administration’s to push through executions. The circumstances surrounding the Trump executions provide a meaningful vehicle for questioning the usage and implementation of the death penalty in this modern era (Hale; Karvosky). The violence, the arbitrary nature, and unconstitutionality of the Trump Executions provides a clear argument to abolish the death penalty. Our Country needs to uphold its moral and constitutional obligations to all of its citizens.

The death penalty has been apart of the American Criminal Justice System since before we became a country. Historically, the death penalty was sentenced with extreme racial bias. White people would only be executed for crimes like murder while Black people would be executed for lesser crimes like rape, theft, and escape during slavery (Steiker & Steiker). Many Northern States abolished the death penalty in the mid 1800s but Southern States were far more less receptive. The Federal death penalty has always been availiable and was only paused during Furman v. Georgia which ruled the death penalty as too arbitraily applied. The “1976 cases” allowed for a appropriately constrained death penalty and the 1994 crime bill expanded the death penalty (Karvosky).

Trump Administration rushes the execution of 13 long term death row inmates

The death penalty “is a relic of the earliest days of penology when, slavery, branding, and other corporal punishments were commonplace” - Hugo Adam Bedau for the ACLU

You cannot argue that lethal injection is not a direct outcome of America’s history of violent, corporal punishment. Pentobarbital overdose, the method utilized by the federal government and a majority of active death penalty states, has been shown to cause pulmonary edema in its victims. A pulmonary edema cause the prisoner to appear to die peacefully, but instead they are forced to suffer silently as they feel like they are being waterboarded (Hale).

It is simply not characteristic of a civilized society to engage in the premeditated killing of its own citizens. A proven comparison is shown through the European Union’s death penalty policies (Bedau). We need to follow the precedent set by many of our allied nations and abolish capital punishment. Why can we not identify the death penalty as inherently barbaric and unjust use of governmental power? If we claim as a society to respect and protect life, we should not deliberately kill human beings.

This blatant ignoring of the racial factors in capital sentencing has influenced the clear racial disparities in sentencing we see today.

One cannot argue that there is no inherent racial bias in capital sentencing. The racial bias threatens the sanctity of our criminal justice system and wholeheartedly puts itself in opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment.

Data from Death Penalty Information Center

There is the risk of carrying out the ultimate punishment, death, on innocent civilians if the Criminal Justice system Continues to Sentence People to death.

One of the most egregious examples of an innocent person being executed is Carlos DeLuna, who was convicted of the murder of Wanda Lopez even though another man, Carlos Hernandez, was the real killer who bragged about Lopez’s murder for the rest of his life. A Chicago Tribune investigation found five separate people who described Hernandez calling DeLuna his “stupid tocayo,” or namesake and Hernandez admitting to stabbing Lopez and another woman in 1979. This case is so wholly relevant to the death penalty debate because it proves that an innocent person has been executed since the death penalty procedural overhaul following the 1976 cases. It wholly rebukes Justice Scalia’s opinion in Kansas v. Marsh that there has never been an innocent person executed in the modern history of the death penalty (Cohen).

Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

Our country currently stands firmly within a new era of capital punishment. We are at a point where a majority of Americans believe the Death Penalty is applied unfairly and only fifty three percent of Americans’ support the Death Penalty for those convicted of murder (Maher & Holsinger). With the upcoming presidential election, the fate of capital punishment in the United States is deeply linked to the outcome. A win from Biden could mean a continued moratorium on death sentences and potential commutation for all those on death row. It could also mean further change in the makeup of the Supreme Court. A win from Trump could mean a continuance of the execution policy exhibited at the end of his term, one that executes those on death row in arbitrary manner for political gain. It could mean further Supreme Court precedent that empowers capital punishment and diminishes the protected constitutional rights of those on death row.

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