Abolishing Capital
Punishment
CALEB HILL
The death
penalty is
racist
A
study in California found that
those convicted of killing whites
were more than 3 times as likely
to be sentenced to death as
those convicted of killing blacks
and more than 4 times more likely
as those convicted of killing
Latinos
Current U.S. Death Row Population by Race
Race
Number
Percentage
Black
1062
41.60%
Latinx
343
13.44%
White
1076
42.15%
Other
72
2.81%
Persons Executed for Interracial Murders
350
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
black on white
white on black
Misconduct
By category, the leading contributing causes of wrongful conviction in
the death-row exonerations between 2007 and April 2017 were:
•Official misconduct (28 cases, 82.4%)
•Perjury or false accusation (26 cases, 76.5%)
•False or misleading forensic evidence (11 cases, 32.4%)
•Inadequate legal defense (8 cases, 23.5%)
•False or fabricated confession (6 cases, 17.6%)
•Mistaken eyewitness identification (4 cases, 11.8%)
Misconduct can kill an innocent person
Since 1973, more than 180 people have been
released from death row with evidence of their
innocence

An average of 3.94 wrongly convicted death-row
prisoners have been exonerated each year since 1973.

Inhumane
and
outdated
methods
Lethal
injection
1352 people killed due
to lethal injection since
1976
Gas
chamber
11 people killed due to
Gas chamber since 1976
Firing
squad
3 people killed due
to Firing squad since
1976
Hanging
3 people killed due
to Hanging since
1976
Electrocution
163 people killed due to Electrocution since 1976
More
than 70% of the world’s
countries have abolished
capital punishment in law or
practice. The U.S. is an outlier
among its close allies in its
continued use of the death
penalty.
Expensive
penalty
to keep the death
Enforcing
the death penalty
costs Florida $51 million a year
above what it would cost to
punish all first-degree murderers
with life in prison without parole.
Based on the 44 executions
Florida had carried out since
1976, that amounts to a cost of
$24 million for each execution
Helping
victim’s families
Instead of spending
money in punishing
the criminal, put
money towards the
families affected
It
is wrong to kill a person
Their shouldn't be legal exceptions
Why should the government be
allowed to, when its citizens can’t
Conclusion
Capital punishment should be abolished. There is no lesson
to be learn from killing someone. Its cruel, outdated, racist,
expensive, and has a high chance of error.