According to Merriam-Webster.com, capital punishment is Execution of an offender sentenced to death after conviction by a court of law of a criminal offense. Capital punishment for murder, treason, arson, and rape was widely employed in ancient Greece, and the Romans also used it for a wide range of offenses. It has been sanctioned at one time or another by most of the world’s major religions. In 1794 the U.S. state of Pennsylvania became the first jurisdiction to restrict the death penalty to first-degree murder.

“As if one crime of such nature, done by a single man, acting individually, can be expiated by a similar crime done by all men, acting collectively,”  said Lewis Lawes, warden of Sing Sing prison in NY in the 1920s and 30s

The first recorded execution in America was Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608. Captain George Kendall was executed for being a spy for Spain.  Most recently in 2014, Juan Carlos Chavez was executed for murdering Jimmy Ryce, a nine year old boy in Florida.

Over the years, the reasons for getting the sentence to death has changed, but what needs to change is having capital punishment abolished thoughout the United States. In no way am I saying that the people who have been executed did not do anything wrong.  What I am saying is that no person deserves to die by the hands of the state.

From infoplease.com According to Amnesty International, 140 countries have abolished the death penalty. In 2012, only one country, Latvia, abolished the death penalty for all crimes. In 2011, 21 countries around the world were known to have carried out executions and at least 63 to have imposed death sentences.

Why can’t America as a whole abolish capital punishment?  Giving the States their own choice to have the death penalty as a way to control criminal behaviors is reminiscent of the times when the government gave the States the opinion to be a slave state or not to be one. In the end, people will see that this type of “justice” will seem cruel and uncivil.  As Desmond Tutu gracefully puts it, “To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.”  In my opinion, if the person committed a crime instead having them put to death let them suffer for what they did. Let them sit in jail and really think about what they did.

Human rights attorney Stephen Bright succinctly offers “It can be argued that rapists deserve to be raped, that mutilators deserve to be mutilated. Most societies, however, refrain from responding in this way because the punishment is not only degrading to those on whom it is imposed, but it is also degrading to the society that engages in the same behavior as the criminals.” In a similar vein, Ghandi encapsulates the argument well with his quote that resonates through the ages, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”
Many argue that the death penalty has never been an effective deterrent that errors sometimes lead to the execution of innocent persons, and that capital punishment is imposed inequitably, mostly on the poor and on racial minorities.

One popular execution that resulted from misinformation was the case of Carlos DeLuna. He was executed in Texas in 1989. DeLuna looked a lot like the person who they were looking for but because law enforcement and people who were involved in this case were so clouded by hate that they missed simple facts. These mistakes caused an innocent man his life. There have been many cases where people who have been put to death only to find out later that the accused had been wrongly convicted. When an inmate is put to death, there is no way to turn back from it.

Concerning the claim of justice for the victim’s family, I say there is no amount of retaliatory deaths that would compensate to me the inestimable value of my daughter’s life, nor would they restore her to my arms. To say that the death of any other person would be just retribution is to insult the immeasurable worth of our loved ones who are victims. We cannot put a price on their lives. That kind of justice would only dehumanize and degrade us because it legitimates an animal instinct for gut-level blood thirsty revenge…. In my case, my own daughter was such a gift of joy and sweetness and beauty, that to kill someone in her name would have been to violate and profane the goodness of her life; the idea is offensive and repulsive to me,”  said Marietta Jaeger, whose 7 year-old daughter Susie was kidnapped and murdered in the US in 1973.