An opinion piece by a writer under the pseudonym of Jack Padfield. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the opinion of Invenire Media.
Capital Punishment started as early as 18th Century BC in the Babylonian Kingdom. There have been many famous cases of capital punishment, including Jesus being crucified, French guillotining, and Queen Mary of England burning Protestants at the stake. It has been used all around the world, even today in more than 50 countries.
Capital Punishment was formally abolished in the UK in 1965 when Harold Wilson’s Labour Government came to office. The House of Commons, in a free vote, voted by 343 to 185 that the Abolishment of the Death Penalty Act should not expire. The last execution in the UK took place in 1964, and in a poll conducted by YouGov in 2014, only 45% of the public supported the capital punishment system, compared to 51% from a similar survey 4 years ago. America is one of the most developed countries to still use capital punishment, starting it in the early 17th century, and the American abolition movement started in the early 20th century, where during 1907 and 1917 nine states abolished the capital punishment system. Currently today capital punishment is authorized by 31 U.S states.
There are many advantages to the Capital Punishment system, including it being a deterrent, making people respect the law, and it is retribution. But I think that the cons outweigh the pros here:
Killing someone is an inhumane action. There is no exact definition of human rights, but I think that it is a universal agreement that all humans have the right to live. Even though there all lots of benefits to capital punishment, it is almost never acceptable to kill someone, except in extremely rare cases such as self defence. On a poll on debate.org about whether it is OK to kill a human being, of the 65% who said yes, 62.5% of them said only in self defence or defence of another human. In an article by Ivan Simonovic, PhD, LLM, Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Responsibility to Protect, he said “In my view, the death penalty is morally, socially and politically wrong. Morally, killing is wrong. Killing on behalf of a state is wrong as well. Some may believe that the death penalty is a just and moral punishment for the most serious of crimes; victims and their families are morally entitled to long for revenge. However, the social, political and economical costs of such retribution are, in my opinion, too high… No national interest can justify human rights violations such as the death penalty or torture.”
Killing someone is an irreversible action. In some cases, the person accused of the crime is actually innocent, and it is too late to pardon him/her. Then everyone involved would feel shame and regret. Nothing could be done to bring the victim back to life. Even a posthumous pardon can’t change what has already been done. A study led by University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross showed that at least 4% of convicted deviants on death row were and are likely innocent. There are some very famous cases of this, including Jesus, Troy Davis and Timothy Evans, the last one’s case prompting the abolition of capital punishment in the UK.
The death penalty does not act as a deterrent. There is absolutely no statistical evidence to show that the death penalty stops deviants from committing more heinous crimes that would have had them executed. 40% of people in the YouGov poll said that they would prefer to be executed straight away rather than stay in prison for life without parole. This shows that the death penalty is not a deterrent for deviants. And in the same poll, 41% said that they thought that the death penalty did not deter deviants. If you think that the general public’s thoughts are not enough to support abolishing capital punishment, then this might satisfy you. A study in 2008 by Professor Michael Radelet and Traci Lacock of the University of Colorado found that 88% of professional criminologists believed that capital punishment did not deter deviants. The study was published in the Journal of Criminal law and Criminology, and claimed that “there is overwhelming consensus among America’s top criminologists that the empirical research conducted on the deterrence question fails to support the threat or use of the death penalty.” A previous study in 1996 found similar conclusions. Criminologists surveyed included fellows in the American Society of Criminology (ASC), Winners of the ASC’s Sutherland Award (the highest award given by ASC for contributions to criminological theory), or Presidents of the ASC between 1997 and 2008 (presidents before 1997 were included in the prior survey). Respondents were asked to base their answers on existing empirical research, not their own opinions on capital punishment. Nearly 78% of those surveyed said that having the death penalty in a state does not lower the murder rate. The results of both studies are shown below.
Purple on the pie charts represent respondents who said “No”, while yellow shows “Yes” and grey means “No Opinion”. It is clear that the overwhelming majority of professional American criminologists show that the death penalty is not a deterrent, which defeats one of the main “reasons” why capital punishment should be used. Even in America today, with 31 states using capital punishment, crime continues to occur all over these states. If anything, the death penalty will motivate more deviants and terrorists to commit crimes, which is obviously a terrible outcome. The death penalty fails to rehabilitate deviants. If we go back to childhood times (which is not that big a journey in my case!) and relive some of the moments when we were in trouble, we seem to remember a lot of telling offs and punishments. We were miserable and grumpy after getting into trouble, but we were given a second chance. We don’t seem to remember doing something incredibly wrong for the first time and then getting killed as a punishment (or I very much hope so!) Most deviants convicted of heinous crimes such as murder and sentenced to death were first offenders. That gave them absolutely no chance to prove that they had learned from their mistakes. In the film The Shawshank Redemption, in Red’s first two parole hearings he responds to the question “Do you feel you’ve been rehabilitated?” by saying “Oh, yes sir. Absolutely. I can honestly say I’m a changed man.” In both cases, Red was rejected. Red doesn’t understand the meaning or importance of rehabilitation. Nor, it seems, does America. Red was just saying that to get paroled. He didn’t actually mean it. The Americans are even worse, with no attempt to rehabilitate deviants. Americans say that capital punishment is a great thing. Americans say that capital punishment will benefit the economy because a lot of money is spent on deviants, which we will discuss later, but I think that it is money well spent because rehabilitation of deviants is incredibly important. If deviants’ rehabilitations are successful, although it might cost a little bit more financially, it saved a life. It equates to spending money on an expensive operation. This is not justice. This is an injustice. If the Americans are so heartless as to not even try to rehabilitate deviants, and they just throw away a life which could have been saved, then I don’t think they should have the power to make such important decisions.
The death penalty does not save money.Richard C. Dieter, MS, JD, former Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, stated the following in his “Testimony Submitted to the Nebraska Legislature”:
“One of the most common misperceptions about the death penalty is the notion that the death penalty saves money because executed defendants no longer have to be cared for at the state’s expense. If the costs of the death penalty were to be measured at the time of an execution, that might indeed be true. But as every prosecutor, defence attorney, and judge knows, the costs of a capital case begin long before the sentence is carried out. Experienced prosecutors and defence attorneys must be assigned and begin a long period of investigation and pre-trial hearings. Jury selection, the trial itself, and initial appeals will consume years of time and enormous amounts of money before an execution is on the horizon… All of the studies conclude that the death penalty system is far more expensive than an alternative system in which the maximum sentence is life in prison.”
Plenty of deviants have had to be on death row for over 20 years: Troy Davis supposedly committed a crime in 1989, but he was executed only in 2011. The case itself, which took 2 years, must have cost a lot of money also. People think that the death penalty saves a lot of money. You can see here that it really doesn’t. In 2000 a fiscal impact summary from the Oregon Department of Administrative Services stated that the Oregon Judicial Department alone would save $2.3 million annually if the death penalty was abolished. It is estimated that total prosecution and defence costs to Oregon and its counties equal $9 million per year. These figures will come at a shock to most, as the majority of the public thinks that the capital punishment system is more economical than life without parole. It can be, but not as much as people think: in 2010, a death row inmate spent an average of 178 months (almost 15 years) on death row before being executed, and lots of inmates have been known to commit suicide when on death row, and even die there.
The Death Penalty is applied at random. Around 15000 – 17000 homicides take place in America annually. Approximately 120 are executed, less than 1%. It is a “lethal lottery” in the words of the OADP. According to the Oregonian, in 1995 there were a series of trials for three Washington County murder cases. One suspected deviant was executed. The other two deviants, one of whom was found to be guilty of 4 murders, are not on death row. The New York Times called it “the Random Horror of the Death Penalty”. A number of studies in the last 3 decades have shown that black deviants are more likely to be sentenced to death if their victim is white rather than black. But defenders of capital punishment often respond to these studies by arguing that the “worst of the worst” are sentenced to death because their crimes are the most egregious. A Connecticut study, conducted by John Donohue, a Stanford law professor, completely dispels this erroneous reasoning. It analysed all murder cases in Connecticut over a 34-year period and found that deviants on death row are indistinguishable from equally violent offenders who escape that penalty. It shows that the process in Connecticut – similar to those in other death-penalty states- is arbitrary and discriminatory.
From 1973, when Connecticut passed a death penalty law, to 2007, 4686 murders were committed in the state. Of those, 205 were capital cases that resulted in a conviction, either
Professor Donohue designed an “egregiousness” rating system to compare all 205 cases. It considered four factors: victim suffering, victim characteristics, deviant’s culpability, and the number of victims.
The egregiousness scores for the deviants charged with capital murder and those who were not were virtually identical; the nature of the crime bore almost no relationship to how the case came out. Among the 29 who had a death penalty hearing, there is no clear difference in the level of egregiousness for the 17 who got life without parole and the 12 sentenced to death. Among the 32 most awful cases on the egregiousness scale, only 1 resulted in a death sentence.
Rather than punish the worst deviants, the Connecticut system, Donohue found, operates with “arbitrariness and discrimination”. The racial effect is very evident, as is the geographic disparity.
In 1972, the Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia case struck down state death-penalty laws that lacked guidelines on how the penalty should be applied. It found that with only 15% of death-eligible murder convictions in Georgia leading to a death sentence, imposition of the penalty was rare – and therefore arbitrary and unconstitutional. The rate in the Donohue study is far more extreme at 4.4%.
The number of new death sentences imposed to deviants is falling. In 2000, there were 224 new deviants under the death sentence. In 2010 there were 104, and in 2011 there were 78. This is strong evidence that capital punishment is arbitrary and unconstitutional.
This is not only an issue about the death penalty, but it shows that there are still signs of racism in the US. The death penalty is another way that racist people can “get back at” people of the opposite race.
The death penalty is more likely to affect more poor deviants. In a lot of cases, deviants are sentenced to death because they could not afford a more experienced lawyer. In a study conducted by Professor James S. Liebman of Columbia University School of Law, Professor Jeffrey Fagan of Joseph Mailman School of Public Health and Valerie West, a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology, New York University, they reviewed 5760 capital cases between 1973 and 1995. Courts found serious reversible errors in 68% of capital cases. The most common errors were incompetent defence lawyers who failed to look for or recognize important evidence of innocence or mitigating factors, and police or prosecutors who suppressed evidence. The diagram below shows what happened to the deviants whose capital judgments were overturned by state post-conviction courts.
So 82% of the 68% of deviants whose cases were overturned were not guilty of capital crimes and would have been wrongly executed. This comes in at 55.76% of deviants being wrongly executed because they had a bad defence attorney. Only 12.24% of deviants were actually guilty of a capital crime, and 4.76% of defendants were actually innocent. These were only found because cases were overturned, costing millions of dollars per case just to find these errors. Non-capital trials are much more effective because it will be quicker as there is less of a need to absolutely prove the suspect’s deviancy as the maximum sentence the suspect can receive is a life sentence, and that can be reversed if the suspect is pardoned. Many of the resources consumed by the capital system don’t help to obtain valid death sentences; these resources have been wasted on cases that should never have been capital in the first place. If the U.S continues to waste money and resources in this way, there will not be a chance to overturn potentially flawed cases, and save potentially innocent suspects.
Every single one of these studies I have shown to you in this project have been read thousands of times online. But those who support Capital Punishment turn a blind eye to this. There is even an example of the victim’s mother pleading for the prosecutors to accept a defence offer to plead guilty to all charges, but prosecutors’ desire for the death penalty is so strong that they are ignoring the wishes of the victim’s family in their pursuit of it. Why? Why won’t they abolish the death penalty?
In a Gallup Poll, 37% of those supporting the death penalty said that they did this because of the Bible quote: “An eye for an eye”. More than half of supporters of the death penalty say that they do because of something relating to revenge. But as Mahatma Gandhi once said, “An eye for an eye and the world goes blind”, meaning that you can’t solve violence with violence. And Archbishop Desmond Tutu also said, “To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge; it is not justice”. Revenge and retribution is wrong, as is the capital punishment system.
Capital punishment is not just punishment.
40 years have passed since Red was sentenced to life in prison. He’s going to his 3rd parole hearing.
PAROLE MAN: Says here that you’ve served 40 years of a life sentence. Do you feel like you’ve been rehabilitated?
RED: Rehabilitated? Well, now, let me see. You know, I don’t have any idea what that means.
PAROLE MAN: Well, it means that you’re ready to re-join society…
RED: I know what you think it means, sonny. To me, it’s just a made-up word. A politician’s word, so that young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and tie and have a job. What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did?
PAROLE MAN: Well, are you?
RED: There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then, a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are, but I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this old man is all that’s left. Rehabilitated? It’s just a bullsh*t word. So you go on and stamp your forms, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a sh*t.
After 40 years in prison, Red finally managed to get parole. He finally understood what rehabilitated meant.
I hope the rest of the world does so that we can finally say goodbye to a world of capital punishment.
Capital Punishment started as early as 18th Century BC in the Babylonian Kingdom. There have been many famous cases of capital punishment, including Jesus being crucified, French guillotining, and Queen Mary of England burning Protestants at the stake. It has been used all around the world, even today in more than 50 countries.
Capital Punishment was formally abolished in the UK in 1965 when Harold Wilson’s Labour Government came to office. The House of Commons, in a free vote, voted by 343 to 185 that the Abolishment of the Death Penalty Act should not expire. The last execution in the UK took place in 1964, and in a poll conducted by YouGov in 2014, only 45% of the public supported the capital punishment system, compared to 51% from a similar survey 4 years ago. America is one of the most developed countries to still use capital punishment, starting it in the early 17th century, and the American abolition movement started in the early 20th century, where during 1907 and 1917 nine states abolished the capital punishment system. Currently today capital punishment is authorized by 31 U.S states.
There are many advantages to the Capital Punishment system, including it being a deterrent, making people respect the law, and it is retribution. But I think that the cons outweigh the pros here:
Killing someone is an inhumane action. There is no exact definition of human rights, but I think that it is a universal agreement that all humans have the right to live. Even though there all lots of benefits to capital punishment, it is almost never acceptable to kill someone, except in extremely rare cases such as self defence. On a poll on debate.org about whether it is OK to kill a human being, of the 65% who said yes, 62.5% of them said only in self defence or defence of another human. In an article by Ivan Simonovic, PhD, LLM, Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Responsibility to Protect, he said “In my view, the death penalty is morally, socially and politically wrong. Morally, killing is wrong. Killing on behalf of a state is wrong as well. Some may believe that the death penalty is a just and moral punishment for the most serious of crimes; victims and their families are morally entitled to long for revenge. However, the social, political and economical costs of such retribution are, in my opinion, too high… No national interest can justify human rights violations such as the death penalty or torture.”
Killing someone is an irreversible action. In some cases, the person accused of the crime is actually innocent, and it is too late to pardon him/her. Then everyone involved would feel shame and regret. Nothing could be done to bring the victim back to life. Even a posthumous pardon can’t change what has already been done. A study led by University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross showed that at least 4% of convicted deviants on death row were and are likely innocent. There are some very famous cases of this, including Jesus, Troy Davis and Timothy Evans, the last one’s case prompting the abolition of capital punishment in the UK.
The death penalty does not act as a deterrent. There is absolutely no statistical evidence to show that the death penalty stops deviants from committing more heinous crimes that would have had them executed. 40% of people in the YouGov poll said that they would prefer to be executed straight away rather than stay in prison for life without parole. This shows that the death penalty is not a deterrent for deviants. And in the same poll, 41% said that they thought that the death penalty did not deter deviants. If you think that the general public’s thoughts are not enough to support abolishing capital punishment, then this might satisfy you. A study in 2008 by Professor Michael Radelet and Traci Lacock of the University of Colorado found that 88% of professional criminologists believed that capital punishment did not deter deviants. The study was published in the Journal of Criminal law and Criminology, and claimed that “there is overwhelming consensus among America’s top criminologists that the empirical research conducted on the deterrence question fails to support the threat or use of the death penalty.” A previous study in 1996 found similar conclusions. Criminologists surveyed included fellows in the American Society of Criminology (ASC), Winners of the ASC’s Sutherland Award (the highest award given by ASC for contributions to criminological theory), or Presidents of the ASC between 1997 and 2008 (presidents before 1997 were included in the prior survey). Respondents were asked to base their answers on existing empirical research, not their own opinions on capital punishment. Nearly 78% of those surveyed said that having the death penalty in a state does not lower the murder rate. The results of both studies are shown below.
Purple on the pie charts represent respondents who said “No”, while yellow shows “Yes” and grey means “No Opinion”. It is clear that the overwhelming majority of professional American criminologists show that the death penalty is not a deterrent, which defeats one of the main “reasons” why capital punishment should be used. Even in America today, with 31 states using capital punishment, crime continues to occur all over these states. If anything, the death penalty will motivate more deviants and terrorists to commit crimes, which is obviously a terrible outcome. The death penalty fails to rehabilitate deviants. If we go back to childhood times (which is not that big a journey in my case!) and relive some of the moments when we were in trouble, we seem to remember a lot of telling offs and punishments. We were miserable and grumpy after getting into trouble, but we were given a second chance. We don’t seem to remember doing something incredibly wrong for the first time and then getting killed as a punishment (or I very much hope so!) Most deviants convicted of heinous crimes such as murder and sentenced to death were first offenders. That gave them absolutely no chance to prove that they had learned from their mistakes. In the film The Shawshank Redemption, in Red’s first two parole hearings he responds to the question “Do you feel you’ve been rehabilitated?” by saying “Oh, yes sir. Absolutely. I can honestly say I’m a changed man.” In both cases, Red was rejected. Red doesn’t understand the meaning or importance of rehabilitation. Nor, it seems, does America. Red was just saying that to get paroled. He didn’t actually mean it. The Americans are even worse, with no attempt to rehabilitate deviants. Americans say that capital punishment is a great thing. Americans say that capital punishment will benefit the economy because a lot of money is spent on deviants, which we will discuss later, but I think that it is money well spent because rehabilitation of deviants is incredibly important. If deviants’ rehabilitations are successful, although it might cost a little bit more financially, it saved a life. It equates to spending money on an expensive operation. This is not justice. This is an injustice. If the Americans are so heartless as to not even try to rehabilitate deviants, and they just throw away a life which could have been saved, then I don’t think they should have the power to make such important decisions.
The death penalty does not save money.Richard C. Dieter, MS, JD, former Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, stated the following in his “Testimony Submitted to the Nebraska Legislature”:
“One of the most common misperceptions about the death penalty is the notion that the death penalty saves money because executed defendants no longer have to be cared for at the state’s expense. If the costs of the death penalty were to be measured at the time of an execution, that might indeed be true. But as every prosecutor, defence attorney, and judge knows, the costs of a capital case begin long before the sentence is carried out. Experienced prosecutors and defence attorneys must be assigned and begin a long period of investigation and pre-trial hearings. Jury selection, the trial itself, and initial appeals will consume years of time and enormous amounts of money before an execution is on the horizon… All of the studies conclude that the death penalty system is far more expensive than an alternative system in which the maximum sentence is life in prison.”
Plenty of deviants have had to be on death row for over 20 years: Troy Davis supposedly committed a crime in 1989, but he was executed only in 2011. The case itself, which took 2 years, must have cost a lot of money also. People think that the death penalty saves a lot of money. You can see here that it really doesn’t. In 2000 a fiscal impact summary from the Oregon Department of Administrative Services stated that the Oregon Judicial Department alone would save $2.3 million annually if the death penalty was abolished. It is estimated that total prosecution and defence costs to Oregon and its counties equal $9 million per year. These figures will come at a shock to most, as the majority of the public thinks that the capital punishment system is more economical than life without parole. It can be, but not as much as people think: in 2010, a death row inmate spent an average of 178 months (almost 15 years) on death row before being executed, and lots of inmates have been known to commit suicide when on death row, and even die there.
The Death Penalty is applied at random. Around 15000 – 17000 homicides take place in America annually. Approximately 120 are executed, less than 1%. It is a “lethal lottery” in the words of the OADP. According to the Oregonian, in 1995 there were a series of trials for three Washington County murder cases. One suspected deviant was executed. The other two deviants, one of whom was found to be guilty of 4 murders, are not on death row. The New York Times called it “the Random Horror of the Death Penalty”. A number of studies in the last 3 decades have shown that black deviants are more likely to be sentenced to death if their victim is white rather than black. But defenders of capital punishment often respond to these studies by arguing that the “worst of the worst” are sentenced to death because their crimes are the most egregious. A Connecticut study, conducted by John Donohue, a Stanford law professor, completely dispels this erroneous reasoning. It analysed all murder cases in Connecticut over a 34-year period and found that deviants on death row are indistinguishable from equally violent offenders who escape that penalty. It shows that the process in Connecticut – similar to those in other death-penalty states- is arbitrary and discriminatory.
From 1973, when Connecticut passed a death penalty law, to 2007, 4686 murders were committed in the state. Of those, 205 were capital cases that resulted in a conviction, either
Professor Donohue designed an “egregiousness” rating system to compare all 205 cases. It considered four factors: victim suffering, victim characteristics, deviant’s culpability, and the number of victims.
The egregiousness scores for the deviants charged with capital murder and those who were not were virtually identical; the nature of the crime bore almost no relationship to how the case came out. Among the 29 who had a death penalty hearing, there is no clear difference in the level of egregiousness for the 17 who got life without parole and the 12 sentenced to death. Among the 32 most awful cases on the egregiousness scale, only 1 resulted in a death sentence.
Rather than punish the worst deviants, the Connecticut system, Donohue found, operates with “arbitrariness and discrimination”. The racial effect is very evident, as is the geographic disparity.
In 1972, the Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia case struck down state death-penalty laws that lacked guidelines on how the penalty should be applied. It found that with only 15% of death-eligible murder convictions in Georgia leading to a death sentence, imposition of the penalty was rare – and therefore arbitrary and unconstitutional. The rate in the Donohue study is far more extreme at 4.4%.
The number of new death sentences imposed to deviants is falling. In 2000, there were 224 new deviants under the death sentence. In 2010 there were 104, and in 2011 there were 78. This is strong evidence that capital punishment is arbitrary and unconstitutional.
This is not only an issue about the death penalty, but it shows that there are still signs of racism in the US. The death penalty is another way that racist people can “get back at” people of the opposite race.
The death penalty is more likely to affect more poor deviants. In a lot of cases, deviants are sentenced to death because they could not afford a more experienced lawyer. In a study conducted by Professor James S. Liebman of Columbia University School of Law, Professor Jeffrey Fagan of Joseph Mailman School of Public Health and Valerie West, a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology, New York University, they reviewed 5760 capital cases between 1973 and 1995. Courts found serious reversible errors in 68% of capital cases. The most common errors were incompetent defence lawyers who failed to look for or recognize important evidence of innocence or mitigating factors, and police or prosecutors who suppressed evidence. The diagram below shows what happened to the deviants whose capital judgments were overturned by state post-conviction courts.
So 82% of the 68% of deviants whose cases were overturned were not guilty of capital crimes and would have been wrongly executed. This comes in at 55.76% of deviants being wrongly executed because they had a bad defence attorney. Only 12.24% of deviants were actually guilty of a capital crime, and 4.76% of defendants were actually innocent. These were only found because cases were overturned, costing millions of dollars per case just to find these errors. Non-capital trials are much more effective because it will be quicker as there is less of a need to absolutely prove the suspect’s deviancy as the maximum sentence the suspect can receive is a life sentence, and that can be reversed if the suspect is pardoned. Many of the resources consumed by the capital system don’t help to obtain valid death sentences; these resources have been wasted on cases that should never have been capital in the first place. If the U.S continues to waste money and resources in this way, there will not be a chance to overturn potentially flawed cases, and save potentially innocent suspects.
Every single one of these studies I have shown to you in this project have been read thousands of times online. But those who support Capital Punishment turn a blind eye to this. There is even an example of the victim’s mother pleading for the prosecutors to accept a defence offer to plead guilty to all charges, but prosecutors’ desire for the death penalty is so strong that they are ignoring the wishes of the victim’s family in their pursuit of it. Why? Why won’t they abolish the death penalty?
In a Gallup Poll, 37% of those supporting the death penalty said that they did this because of the Bible quote: “An eye for an eye”. More than half of supporters of the death penalty say that they do because of something relating to revenge. But as Mahatma Gandhi once said, “An eye for an eye and the world goes blind”, meaning that you can’t solve violence with violence. And Archbishop Desmond Tutu also said, “To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge; it is not justice”. Revenge and retribution is wrong, as is the capital punishment system.
Capital punishment is not just punishment.
40 years have passed since Red was sentenced to life in prison. He’s going to his 3rd parole hearing.
PAROLE MAN: Says here that you’ve served 40 years of a life sentence. Do you feel like you’ve been rehabilitated?
RED: Rehabilitated? Well, now, let me see. You know, I don’t have any idea what that means.
PAROLE MAN: Well, it means that you’re ready to re-join society…
RED: I know what you think it means, sonny. To me, it’s just a made-up word. A politician’s word, so that young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and tie and have a job. What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did?
PAROLE MAN: Well, are you?
RED: There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then, a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are, but I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this old man is all that’s left. Rehabilitated? It’s just a bullsh*t word. So you go on and stamp your forms, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a sh*t.
After 40 years in prison, Red finally managed to get parole. He finally understood what rehabilitated meant.
I hope the rest of the world does so that we can finally say goodbye to a world of capital punishment.
hi im actually using this for a speech i have to write for tomrorrow in english lol ran out of ideas and had to come back to this ;-;
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