Death Penalty Abolished In Illinois

I could not agree more with the decision to abolish the death penalty in Illinois. Throughout this unit, we have heard  both sides of argument about the justice level of capital punishment and it has forced me to question my beliefs and changed my opinion several times. Before we began learning about the death penalty, I did not have a very concrete opinion that swayed me towards one way or another. The truth of the matter was, I was not educated on the highly controversial debate and was just going off of the opinions of my parents. They are both in favor of the death penalty and believe that an eye for an eye is only fair. I simply accepted this belief and went along with it without question. Soon after we began learning about the death penalty in class, however, my opinion quickly changed.
A life for a life is revenge, it is not justice. The United States sets an example of what is morally acceptable and is supposed to do what is in the best interest of all American citizens. The fact is, capital punishment does more harm and it does good. We learned that several decades ago, the death penalty was taken off the table completely. The country ruled that the current laws for it were too loose and allowed for too many people to be put to death without reasonable cause. Soon after this decision was made, many states began altering their laws for the death penalty and put it back into action. There was a handful of states, however, that continued to reject capital punishment and never reinstated the possibility for execution by the state.
There are two very popular quotes among people who are against the death penalty. Many people believe that "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." This is in reference to the lesson that capital punishment teaches. If we punish murder with murder, we are only causing more death in the country and going against our goal of protecting citizens. This brings me to the second popular quote which mocks the idea of capital punishment by saying, "We kill people to show that killing people is wrong." This makes it perfectly clear how ridiculous the idea of execution is and that it completely goes agains the moral conduct of the United States of America. Even family members of victims of murder agree that killing their loved one's killer will do them no good. It will not bring back to life the person that was lost, or fill the hole in their hearts where this person once was. But even Emit Till's mother, after her young son was brutally murdered by two racist men for no reason other than the color of his skin, can tell you that capital punishment will not help bring her closure or give her Emit back. It will only mean that she has done to her son's killers exactly as they did to him, and she does not want to be anything like the monsters that took her son's life.
In addition to the moral flaws in capital punishment, there are also several legal flaws which prove the injustice of execution by the state. Laws have been made to increase the standards for who can be put to death and who can not. Only a few short years ago, it was still legal to send a mentally retarded person to die. Finally, in the 2002 Supreme Court case of Atkins vs. Virginia, this cruel and unusual punishment was finally proved to be against the American Constitution by violation of the eight amendment. To further prove the injustice of capital punishment, a team of Northwestern journalism students and their teacher did investigations into the court cases of different men on death row in Illinois and eventually proved several different men's innocence. It is disgusting to see that these men spent had spent fifteen years on death row and been less than a couple of days away from their execution when a couple of college students proved their innocence and freed them from jail. With such inaccurate punishments and convictions of supposed murderers in this country, it is completely possible that innocent men and women will be sent to die. Whether it is a result of their race, economic status, or other outside factors, it is evident that the United States justice system is incredibly flawed and the only way to stop the injustice that occurs in execution by the state, is to ban the practice of execution by the state all together.