Capital Punishment
Capital Punishment .By: Stephen Chapman
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Capital Punishment is an issue that has been argued over from the dinner table in the average American home the the oval office in the White House for countless amounts of years. The opposing sides each state their claim on why we should, or shouldn't allow the death penalty to be administered to those criminals who the courts believe should be killed. Each argument has very valid reasons on why the death penalty is right and wrong, and they both have convincing points to prove their argument. The social problems within capital punishment vary from it being morally right or wrong, humane or inhumane, to the excessive time and money that is spent during appeals and stays of execution. This paper will focus on the problem of the justice system, and why we should and should not grant numerous appeals and stays of execution. Capital Punishment has been around since the days of Christ, and its results have not changed, only the way capital punishment is administered has. States such as California use the gas chamber as the means to end the convict's life, while Texas and Florida have used the electric chair in the past, the remedy for death is now by using leatheal injection to end the convicts life. Death has always been used as a way to deter criminals from engaging in criminal activity. In the days of the old west, a man would be hung if he was caught stealing another mans horse, and during the Cold War, death would be handed down if you were convicted of treason against your country in many of the nations involved. Today though, the death penalty is given in a selected amount of murder cases where the jury or judge feels that it is the only way to go about giving the murderer a just sentence, and that life in prison sentence would be to lenient. In 1995, prison authorities saw the largest number of state mandated killings since 1957, and with more that 3,000 inmates on death row in this country, and several legislative moves to cut the appeals process, a execution boom seems imminent (Bruderhof 1996). Pain. Anger. Frustration. Hatred. These feeble words do not describe the anguish felt by the families of murder victims. Ted Bundy was responsible for the deaths of more than fifty young women across the United States (Lamar 34). Bundy was finally sentenced to death by the state of Florida in 1978 after being convicted for the kidnapping and brutal murder of a 12 year old girl and the deaths of two Florida State sorority sisters. As if the loss of a loved one is not enough for a family to deal with, Bundy remained on death row for nearly ten years. Three stays of execution and endless appeals kept Bundy alive for almost a decade, when his victims lives were untimely and viciously taken from them (Lamar 34). Many in fovor of the...
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