“…all men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
--Nicolae Pavel
The death penalty has always been a source of great controversy and deliberation, a process that can take years to follow through with in an effort to execute a charged criminal. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to hear about the discrimination and lack of rational thinking that tends to circulate courtrooms.
The right to live is one of the first rights of the human race. In its entirety, living is a part of the fundamental protection towards human dignity and is crucial towards the modern era. Nicolae Pavel discusses this idea in his article "The Right to Life as a Supreme Value and Guaranteeing the Right to Life" as he reflects on the term "natural law". Natural law requires justification for the laws not revolutionized by society, and instead are based on what was standard during the time of birth--a pure alienable ability to live and breathe freely.
There has also been a significant legitimacy issue when it comes to both the jury and the judges. Susan A. Bandes highlights in her article “Repellent Crimes and Rational Deliberation: Emotion and the Death Penalty” that jurors don't formally understand the meaning of "sympathy" and "mercy" and therefore, are appropriating feelings such as anger as too passionate towards the sentence (496). If jurors cannot fully commit a guilty person to death—someone they believe is worthy of dying—then how can the government continue to allow such inhumane actions to occur without all the information?
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Pavel also notes that because the right to live is one of the oldest rights in human history, all other laws fall beneath it and thus ought to obey the constitution of the first (972). It will be consequential if the laws written under the United States Constitution are disregarded by its own people, and therefore will submit a greater danger to the foundation of the country. By law, the very lives of the country’s inhabitants are secured with understanding that human grief should not desecrate a life, no matter how passionate one might feel towards the crime.
Racial bias has continuously played a part in the death penalty as the vast majority of defendants being executed are minorities, as explained by Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker in their article "The American Death Penalty and the (In)Visibility of Race". The authors further elaborate on how judges avoided all discussion of race entirely, even in cases undeniable in their racial discrimination. They also went to the point of releasing jurors who questioned the morality of the death penalty itself. Furthermore, there are instances where minorities are wrongly accused of a crime and sentenced anyway.
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William Glaberson and Benjamin Weiser note in their article “Decisions on Death Cases Raise Questions of Race” that “The Clinton administration study found. . . 134 of the 682 defendants who faced capital charges, or about 20 percent, were white” (Glaberson and Weiser 2). This prompts the idea that the vast majority of defendants being penalized with the death penalty are Black people, a significant bias being shown and a definite issue for the mindset of America.
Here are two current perspectives, Democratic and Republican, on the death penalty debate.
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The death penalty is a dangerous action that ultimately ends someone's life. Death, which is final, will remain as a reminder of the price someone paid for a crime they either committed or did not commit. Why risk something that if it is not 100% full-proof?