Capital Punishment in the U.S.

Essay by Pietro CondelloHigh School, 11th grade March 1997

download word file, 10 pages 3.8

This essay is about Capital Punishment and why it should be abolished and why it is brutal and barbaric

Report - Capital Punishment in the U.S.

At one time in the United States, when there was widespread community participation in executions, people closed their stores and schools, and watched a condemned person being paraded to the gallows. Concession booths were set up, and often politicians took advantage of the mass of people and got a little bit of campaigning.(NAR, p.7)

About 20,000 people showed up for the last public execution in the U.S. - a hanging in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1936. By that time, executions had moved behind prison walls, into little rooms with no windows, where the death of the person was observed by only a few selected 'witnesses.'(ECE)

Although Canada got rid of capital punishment in 1976, it is alive and well in the U.S. In fact, thirty-eight people were executed in 1993 in ten states, more than in any year since 1962.

In 1992, 31 prisoners were put to death. For example, the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, executed by lethal injection in May 1994 in Illinois. He was the 12th killed that year. Time is running out for the 2,700 convicts on death row -- a number that keeps getting bigger almost daily.(ECE)

Americans are revolted because they have so much violent crime. They are desperate to do something about it, and, so the killing of murderers continues despite evidence that it does not deter crime.(EVA, p.90). Although U.S. legislators in the U.S. strongly support capital punishment, they are trying to make it more efficient, more humane and more acceptable to the public.(ECE). Neither supporters, nor abolitionists consider the pain experienced in those windowless rooms. I think it's time they did.

Acceptable or not, Americans cannot...