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Its barbarism alone warrants banning it unconditionally. Other factors make it more convincing, including:
(1) Its application is racially biased with regard to defendants and victims, CEDP saying minority lives are less valued than whites. Blacks are about 12% of the population, but comprise 42% of death row prisoners. In Ohio, it's over 50%, and in southern states like Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, North and South Carolina it's more than 60%. Since 1776, America executed over 18,000 prisoners. Only 42 involved a white person for killing a Black, and according to AI, more than 20% of executed Black defendants were convicted by all-white juries.
(2) Poor people are unfairly affected, former Supreme Court Justice William O. Black quoted saying, "One searches our chronicles in vain for the execution of any member of the affluent strata in this society." In other words, those able to afford good legal representation avoid death row. Over 90% charged with murder are poor, unable to pay for a proper defense, instead relying on inexperienced counsel or public defenders with little interest in their case.
(3) Death sentences condemn innocent victims to die. Since 1973, 123 people in 25 states were discovered innocent and released. And they may be the tip of the iceberg, many others less lucky because authorities won't admit mistakes and often bogusly convict maliciously or for other unjustifiable reasons. Criminologist Michael Radlet explained that from 1900 - 1992, 416 documented cases of innocent people were convicted of murder or capital rape, one-third given the death sentence.
(4) Death penalty convictions don't deter crime. For example, southern states have a higher murder rate than northern ones even though 80% of executions occur there.
(5) As the Supreme Court said in 1972, "the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments." Even with no hitches, it's barbaric, but when botched it inflicts severe, sustained pain. As a result, in 2007, executions were on hold in over a dozen states, and botched ones put lethal injections under more scrutiny.
In 2005, The Lancet published a medical researcher team report, finding "that in 43 of the 49 executed prisoners studied, the anesthetic administered during lethal injection was lower than required for surgery. In 43 percent of cases, drug levels were consistent with awareness." As a result, executions involved extreme pain, amounting to torture and still do willfully to inflict extra suffering.
Opposition to Capital Punishment
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