I am not convinced that the United States justice system is a completely just system after all. When a case is first introduced, the police or detectives working on interview witnesses or people who knew the victim to find suspects. Sometimes they show pictures of relatively random people in their society who already have a criminal record to see if they resmemble the criminal. In some cases, the witness will wrongly accuse a person who looks similar to the actual murderer or criminal. Once suspects are chosen, however, more steps are set in place to make a more reasonable and accurate decision on whether the person is guilty or not, and if found guilty, what his or her punishment should be. There are many stages to the trial which allow for the jury to recieve a plethera of information about the crime and the people involved, and to take their time coming to a decision. There are many laws set in place to assure that it a fair and proportinate punishment is given to the person convicted, but this is only true if you consider the death treatment to be a fair and reasonable punishment under any circumstance, which I do not. There is also a three week period after the person is convicted, for more evidence to be turned in that might prove them to be innocent. While at first this seemed like a great bonus that the attorneies could still prove their clients to be innocent even after the decision was wrongfully made, I realized that it is incredibly unjust for there to be a three week limit on this opportunity. If solid evidance is uncovered a month after the decision is made, no matter how strong the evidence is, it sounds like it is too late for it to be factored into the case to prove the man or woman on trial to be innocent. I greatly question how accuratly people are found guilty and if execution is a fair punishment.
Of all of these practices of execution, I believe that lethal injection is the most humane. It still has the potential to result in imense pain for the person being exectuioned if they do not have a useable vein or if the person who inserted the neeles did it incorectly. Still, the other forms of exectuion that have been practiced in the United States, such as hanging, electricution, gas chambers, and firing squads are far more disturbing and really make the man or woman being exectuted suffer. It makes me question this nation completely, if our government will allow its citizens to be treated in such inhumane ways. The way that the executions were described were absolutely brutal and horrifying. They were tortured and died miserable deaths under different forms of execution. I know that some of these criminals committed atrocious acts of their own to their victims, I still can not understand using murder to punish them. I believe a more fitting punishment would be to force them to live lonely, miserable lives in jail, tortured over what the sins they committed and left to spend the rest of their lives in jail.
The number of people executed since 1976 plummeted greatly all across the country. It is clear that the country has under gone some major ethical and moral changes. Of all of the regions in the United States, it seems that the states that have had the highest number of citizens executed since 1976 were states in the deep, middle south, around Texas. Some states in the north have completely outlawed the death penalty (fourteen to be exact) but even some states that still allow the death penalty have very low numbers and rarely go as far as execution. Another point that I find interesting, is the number of people currently on death row in some states. Some places, such as California, have hundreds of people currently on death row, yet in the more than thirty years that the death penalty has been reinstated, these states have only gone through with executing a select few of these people. Only one or sometimes two digit worth of citizens in these states are put to death. The incredible decline in the number of people who have been executed in this country is also largely due to the changes made in the justice system over time. Many restrictions have been added to eliminate executions that would now be considered "cruel and unusual" punishment and found unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment.
The statutes for Illinois's old death penalty seemed fairly reasonable. All of the laws seemed to reasonably fit the punishment of death. They all revolved around murder and severe crimes of extremely violent nature. These laws seemed pretty similar to those of the other states in the US that enforce the death penalty. Laws have become a lot more strict, requiring the punishment to truly fit the crime.
This data shows that there are now 16 states that don't allow the death penalty, not 14 like the last chart said. There is also a chart that says how many people have been killed in the entire country since 1976, showing just over 1200 deaths. What is incredible, is how much this number has decreased. According to some of the previous charts I saw, a couple of states had over 1200 people executed in that one state alone before the year 1976. I find it interesting that while 35% of those tried for the death penalty, only 15% of victims of these cases are black which suggests that cases were a black person is murdered less frequently result in the criminal being put on death row. Overall, I think it is clear that America's reactions towards the death penalty have changed drastically over time and as the laws became increasingly more strict, less and less people condoned the death penalty.
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