ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION EXAM – SECTION II
Total time—2 hours
Question 1
(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts for one-third of the total essay
section score.)
Currently in the United States, 31 states participate in capital punishment proceedings, Texas
being the number one death penalty state by far with 549 executions since 1982. Some states,
however, have already banned the use of capital punishment or planned on voting on this issue
in 2018. The Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty does not violate the Eighth
Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, but the Eighth Amendment does shape
certain procedural aspects regarding when a jury may use the death penalty and how it must be
carried out.
In a well-developed essay that synthesizes at least 3 of the sources, take a position that
defends, challenges, or qualifies the statement that the death penalty is not properly managed,
unnecessary, and/or unethical in modern justice systems.
Make sure that your argument is central, using the sources to support your reasoning. The
essay should consist primarily of your ideas, rather than simply a summary of the sources.
Identify any sources drawn from through direct quotation, paraphrase, or summary.
You may cite the sources as Source A, Source B, etc., or by using the descriptions in
parentheses.
Source A (Powers)
Source B (Von Drehle)
Source C (Jacoby)
Source D (Donnelly)
Source E (Funt)
Source F (NCSL)
Source A
Powers, Jeff, et al. “Is Another State About to Abolish the Death Penalty?” IVN.us, 25 Jan.
2018, ivn.us/2018/01/25/another-state-abolish-death-penalty/.
The following is an article from an independent news website regarding Washington state’s
potential change in their current death penalty policy.
Do you think the government should have a hand in dictating morality by applying the
punishment of death to someone who commits a crime? If your answer is no, you might like
what is happening in Washington state. In Washington state, lawmakers across both sides of
the aisle are optimistic that 2018 will be the year that the death penalty is put to rest in the
Evergreen State. In 2014, Washington Governor Jay Inslee placed a moratorium on capital
punishment which would last for as long as he was in office. Lethal injection is legal in
Washington state unless the inmate would prefer to be hanged. Anyone found guilty of
aggravated first-degree murder can be put to death. Seventy-eight people have been executed
in Washington since 1904. The latest bill in the Washington State Legislature would replace the
death penalty with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Democratic State Senator
Jamie Pedersen of Seattle, the new chair on the committee overseeing the bill, expects the
current push to abolish the death penalty to fly straight through the legislature to the governor’s
desk, which would be the furthest this type of legislation has made it in the last five years. “The
stars may be aligning now for support of doing away with the death penalty,” says Pederson.
The Evergreen State hasn’t seen an execution since 2010 when Cal Coburn Brown was
convicted for the 1991 rape and murder of 21 year-old Holly Washa, and was put to death by
lethal injection. The old chairman of Pedersen’s committee, Republican Senator Mike Padden of
Spokane Valley, however, has been an outspoken advocate for the death penalty remaining the
law of the state. Some even place blame on Senator Mike Padden for the stalled progress of
this legislation as he would not grant past death penalty bills a hearing. “I don’t anticipate I’ll be
supporting the bill,” Padden said last week. “Some crimes are so heinous and so brutal that I
think the death penalty is appropriate.” Padden points out that the current laws on capital
punishment have been used as a negotiating tool against some of the state’s most egregious
offenders. Among those offenders is serial killer Gary Ridgway ,who is known as the “Green
River Killer,” who agreed to tell prosecutors the whereabouts of victims in exchange for the
death penalty being taken off the table in his case. Washington state’s prosecutors are split on
the death penalty. “The death penalty is a question with profound moral implications, certainly
worthy of wide discussion,” said Pierce County prosecutor Mark Lindquist.
Source B
Von Drehle, David. “Capital Punishment: The End of the Death Penalty.” Time, 8 June 2015.
Time.com/deathpenalty/.
The following is an article from Time Magazine about the death penalty debate, specifically in regards to
the impending execution of one of the Boston Marathon Bombers.
The case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev absorbed Americans as no death-penalty drama has in years. The saga
of his crime and punishment began with the shocking bloodbath at the 2013 Boston Marathon, continued
through the televised manhunt that paralyzed a major city and culminated in the death sentence handed
down by a federal jury on May 15 after a two-phase trial. Justice was done, in the opinion of 70% of those
surveyed for a Washington Post–ABC News poll in April. Support for capital punishment has sagged in
recent years, but it remains strong in a situation like this, where the offense is so outrageous, the process
so open, the defense so robust and guilt beyond dispute. Even so, Tsarnaev is in no danger of imminent
death. He is one of more than 60 federal prisoners under sentence of execution in a country where only
three federal death sentences have been carried out in the past half-century. A dozen years have passed
since the last one. The situation is similar in state courts and prisons. Despite extraordinary efforts by the
courts and enormous expense to taxpayers, the modern death penalty remains slow, costly and
uncertain. For the overwhelming majority of condemned prisoners, the final step—that last short march
with the strap-down team—will never be taken. The relative few who are killed continue to be selected by
a mostly random cull. Tsarnaev aside, the tide is turning on capital punishment in the U.S., as previously
supportive judges, lawmakers and politicians come out against it. Change is not coming quickly or easily.
Americans have stuck with grim determination to the idea of the ultimate penalty even as other Western
democracies have turned against it. On this issue, our peer group is not Britain and France; it’s Iran and
China. Most U.S. states authorize the death penalty, although few of them actually use it. We value
tolerance and diversity—but certain outrages we will not put up with. Maybe it’s the teenage terrorist who
plants a bomb near an 8-year-old boy. Maybe it’s a failed neuroscientist who turns a Colorado movie
theater into an abattoir. We like to think we know them when we see them. Half a century of inconclusive
legal wrangling over the process for choosing the worst of the worst says otherwise. On May 27, the
conservative Nebraska state legislature abolished the death penalty in that state despite a veto attempt
by Governor Pete Ricketts. A parallel bill passed the Delaware state senate in March and picked up the
endorsement of Governor Jack Markell, formerly a supporter of the ultimate sanction. Only a single vote
in a House committee kept the bill bottled up, and supporters vowed to keep pressing the issue. In
February, Markell’s neighboring governor, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, declared an open-ended
moratorium on executions. That officially idles the fifth largest death row in America. The largest, in
California, is also at a standstill while a federal appeals court weighs the question of whether long delays
and infrequent executions render the penalty unconstitutional. Even in Texas, which leads the nation in
executions since 1976 (when the U.S. Supreme Court approved the practice after a brief moratorium), the
wheels are coming off the bandwagon. From a peak of 40 executions in 2000, the Lone Star State put 10
prisoners to death last year and seven so far in 2015. According to the state’s Department of Corrections,
the number of new death sentences imposed by Texas courts this year is precisely zero. There, as
elsewhere, prosecutors, judges and jurors are concluding that the modern death penalty is a failed
experiment. The shift is more pragmatic than moral, as Americans realize that our balky system of
state-sanctioned killing simply isn’t fixable. As a leader of the Georgia Republican Party, attorney David J.
Burge, recently put it, “Capital punishment runs counter to core conservative principles of life, fiscal
responsibility and limited government. The reality is that capital punishment is nothing more than an
expensive, wasteful and risky government program.
Source C
Jacoby, Jeff. “Execution Saves Innocents...” Boston.com, The Boston Globe, 28 Sept.
2003,
archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/09/28/execution_s
aves_innocents/.
The article below, published in the Boston Globe in 2003, tells of then-governor of Massachusetts Mitt
Romney’s plan to create a fool-proof, error-free death penalty.
In recent years, anti-death penalty propagandists have succeeded in stoking the fear that capital
punishment is being carelessly meted out. But it's a bogus accusation: Of the 875 prisoners executed in
the United States in modern times, not one has been retroactively proved innocent. Widely trumpeted
claims meant to illustrate the system's sloppiness -- that more than 100 innocent men have been freed
from Death Row, for example, or that death penalty cases have a 68 percent error rate -- fall apart under
scrutiny. In fact, so exacting is the due process in these cases that the death penalty in America is
probably the most accurately administered criminal sanction in the world. No worthwhile human endeavor
is utterly foolproof. Dr. Bieber's hospital would have to shut down its operating rooms if surgeons had to
guarantee their infallibility. Even at hospitals as renowned as the Brigham, patients sometimes die on the
operating table because of blunders or inadvertence. Is that an argument for abolishing surgery? Should
air travel be banned because innocent passengers may lose their lives in crashes? Should the
pharmaceutical industry be shut down because the wrong drug or dosage, mistakenly taken or
prescribed, can kill? The benefits of a legal system in which judges and juries have the option of
sentencing the cruelest or coldest murderers to death far outweigh the potential risk of executing an
innocent person. And there is this added reassurance: The risk of an erroneous execution is infinitesimal,
and getting smaller all the time. And the benefits? First and foremost, the death penalty makes it possible
for justice to be done to those who commit the worst of all crimes. The execution of a murderer sends a
powerful moral message: that the innocent life he took was so precious, and the crime he committed so
horrific, that he forfeits his own right to remain alive. When a vicious killer is sent to the electric chair or
strapped onto a gurney for a lethal injection, society is condemning his crime with a seriousness and
intensity that no other punishment achieves. By contrast, a society that sentences killers to nothing worse
than prison -- no matter how depraved the killing or how innocent the victim -- is a society that doesn't
really think murder is so terrible. But there is more to executions than justice for the dead. There is also
protection for the living. For every time a murderer is executed, innocent lives are saved. The foes of
capital punishment have denied for years that putting murderers to death has a deterrent effect on other
potential killers. That has always flown in the face of common sense and history -- after all, wherever
murder is made punishable by death, murder rates generally decline. But it also flies in the face of a
lengthening shelf of research that confirms the death penalty's deterrent effect. A recent study at the
University of Colorado, for instance, finds "a statistically significant relationship between executions,
pardons, and homicide. Specifically, each additional execution reduces homicides by five to six." A paper
by three Emory University economists concludes: "Our results suggest that capital punishment has a
strong deterrent effect. . . . In particular, each execution results, on average, in 18 fewer murders -- with a
margin of error of plus or minus 10." Comparable results have been reached by scholars at the University
of Houston, SUNY Buffalo, Clemson, and the Federal Communications Commission. All these studies
have been published within the past three years. And all of them underscore an inescapable bottom line:
The execution of murderers protects innocent life.
Source D
Liza Donnelly has been a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker Magazine since 1982.
Her work also appears in Medium, Politico, Forbes, CNN, Huffington Post, Daily Beast
and many more, in the U.S. and abroad. Liza is also a writer and an experienced
public speaker. In 2014, the University of Connecticut presented her with an honorary
doctorate degree for her work in freedom of expression and women's rights.
Source E
Peter Funt, Opinion contributor, USA TODAY
'Just Mercy' shows why death penalty, racial disparity in American justice
should make you angry
While the use of capital punishment has decreased, racial bias in death sentences is on the rise. Activist
lawyer still fighting to reverse injustices
Here’s a spoiler: At the end of “Just Mercy,” Michael B. Jordan’s new film about justice, civil rights and capital
punishment, you will be moved. And angry. And if not enlightened at least reminded about the deep fissures
that remain in our legal system.
The movie underscores the plight of the wrongly accused through Walter McMillian — a black man who was
convicted of murder and sentenced to die in Alabama in 1988, and whose struggles are portrayed in the movie
by Jamie Foxx. It also shines a light on the inhumane treatment of the guilty.
I’m not usually a fan of movies with messages, or of Hollywood’s tendency to take liberties with history and
then market the resulting drama as “fact-based.” However, “Just Mercy” is faithful to the memoir of the same
name by Bryan Stevenson, the activist lawyer beautifully portrayed by Jordan. Indeed, the film is so careful
with the facts that some critics have complained it lacks dramatic punch.
I disagree, but judge for yourself when the film opens everywhere on Friday.
A note at the end of the movie explains: “For every nine people who have been executed in the U.S., one person
on death row has been exonerated and released, a shocking rate of error.” Stevenson and his colleagues at his
nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative have won relief or release for more than 140 death row prisoners.
The film uses Stevenson’s early career in the 1980s (soon after he earned his law degree from Harvard) as the
canvas on which to paint a picture of racial bias in the judicial system and, specifically, in the area where it’s
profoundly consequential: the death penalty.
My view that capital punishment is immoral is shared by many Americans. But beyond questions of morality
are problems of cost and racial bias. While the number of executions in America has dropped in recent years —
to a near low of 22 in 2019 — racial bias in capital cases has actually increased.
A recently released study by The Intercept news organization, going back to the reinstatement of the death
penalty in 1976, concludes that “the death penalty appears to be more racially biased than ever.”
In the first decade after capital punishment was reinstated, 46% of those sentenced to die in states that now use
the death penalty were people of color. In the 10 years ending in December 2018, the percentage grew to 60,
according to The Intercept.
At the outset of his legal career, Stevenson was shaken by a 1987 Supreme Court decision upholding the death
penalty in a Georgia case marked by racial prejudice, he told The Wall Street Journal. Writing for the majority,
Justice Lewis Powell deemed the inequities found in Georgia’s death penalty sentencing to be “an inevitable
part of our criminal justice system.”
Last year, New Hampshire became the 21st state to ban capital punishment. California, meanwhile, placed a
total moratorium on executions. Public opposition to the death penalty is increasing. On murder convictions, a
larger percentage of Americans favor life without parole over the death penalty than ever in recent history, at
60%, according to Gallup.
Yet last summer, the Department of Justice announced, after two decades, that it would resume executions for
federal crimes. Attorney General William Barr backed the decision, stating, “We owe it to the victims and their
families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”
Barr chose to overlook the fact that several families of victims in federal cases have spoken out against the death
warrants.
Herbert Richardson (played in the film by Rob Morgan), was a Vietnam War vet crippled by post-traumatic
stress disorder who conceded his role in an Alabama murder — but his fate in the state’s electric chair in 1989 is
almost as heart wrenching as if he were innocent.
The execution scene is handled with great reserve by director Destin Daniel Cretton, yet it packs the film’s most
powerful moral message about capital punishment.
“The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit,” Stevenson writes in
his memoir. “The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?”
Hollywood has done us a favor by bringing Stevenson’s insight and inspiration to the screen. Our politicians
and judges should be required to see it.
Source F
NCSL
We are the nation’s most respected bipartisan organization providing states support, ideas,
connections and a strong voice on capitol hill.
Capital punishment is currently authorized in 27 states, by the federal government and the
U.S. military. In recent years, New Mexico (2009), Illinois (2011), Connecticut (2012),
Maryland (2013), New Hampshire (2019), Colorado (2020) and Virginia (2021) have
legislatively abolished the death penalty, replacing it with a sentence of life imprisonment
with no possibility for parole. The Nebraska Legislature also abolished capital punishment in
2015, but it was reinstated by a statewide vote in 2016. Additionally, courts in Washington
and Delaware recently ruled that the states' capital punishment laws are unconstitutional.
States across the country will continue to debate its fairness, reliability and cost of
implementation.