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Everyone always uses the example, "if your wife was raped, wouldn't you want that scum to get the death penalty?"
but let's go on the other side of that question. What if your husband was being accused of a rape that he didn't commit?
Would you still be in favor of the death penalty? I highly doubt it. The problem with capitol punishment
is that it is not distibuted fairly. Unless courts are 100% sure that the defendant IS guilty of the crime accused, the
government should not be taking their lives away from them. Statistics show that the death penalty does not prevent crime.
We can not prove that capitol punishment prevents murder, in which case, we cannot reasonably base a policy on the assumption that
it does. Starting with the simplest of statistics, if capitol punishment reliably prevented murder, countries with capitol punishment
should generally have the lowest murder rates than countries without. The US, with a highly developed and prosperous society, a
factor which generally reduces murder rates, still has a murder rate about three times as high as most wetern industrialized
nations. Why is that it is okayfor the government to take a human beings life, but the killer is not? Isn't that what he is being punishd for?
Basically we are saying that what he did was so wrong, but yet are doing the same to him/her. Not to metion that it costs more
to keep a person for life in prison than it does to execute them. In order to sentence someone to death, the court needs to go through tons of appeals at a time, and these appeals all cost money. More moneythan you pay to keep the accused for life in prison. Capitol trials cost more for pretty much the same reason general aviation aircraft cost roughly ten times as much as surface vehicles: the greater consequences of failure. Defendants who are sentenced to life can always work toward new evidence and appeals while they serve their sentence; defendants sentenced to death do not have this choice. And we want to keep capitol punishment alive and well in the US because, why?
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