Death Penalty - My Philosophy on it
Uploaded by will3117 on Dec 14, 2011
THE DEATH PENALTY A LOOK AT THE DEATH PENALTY AS HANDED DOWN AND ENFORCED IN THE STATE OF TEXAS
Preface
As I started this essay I found it necessary to first examine what the death penalty meant to me personally, and in examining my feelings about its history, I realized that I like many Americans had no real understanding of the penalties origins, to me, as to many people it has just always been there. I then wanted to look at what I thought of the death penalty as I started this paper, I found I was for it, I thought that the death penalty was applied to extreme cases fairly and evenly and that the moratorium of the 70’s had fixed the question of unfair application of the law, I thought that the Supreme Court had put enough safeguards in the system to weed out those who were unfairly prosecuted and later found to be innocent, I mean don’t they find people on death rows across the nation everyday who were accidentally? Convicted of crimes they didn’t do, doesn’t that signal a conscious effort on the part of the judicial system to never execute an innocent person?
My next step was to look at all the information I had available to me either from the web or various publications and books. I was astounded with the sheer volume of information out there, I found myself overwhelmed. I narrowed it down to central arguments both for and against. I looked at changing opinions about what constitutes a fair and just penalty. I narrowed it down to a few very important points, starting in the mid 80’s the rulings of the Supreme court started handing jurisdiction over administration of the Death penalty back to the states, the court basically decided it didn’t want to continue ruling on the morality of the Death penalty on constitutional grounds, as a result of these decisions, different states handled the penalty differently. In Florida for example the judge in a Death penalty case can overturn the jury’s recommendation and sentence the offender to execution for any reason he or she sees fit. In Texas one of the main questions to be answered by the jury in convicting a murderer to the death penalty is are they a danger to society...