Capital Punishment is Racist, and Should Be Banned.

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        Blatant Racism is seen and heard too often in the courtrooms in the country. In death penalty cases, the use of derogatory slurs kindles the flames of prejudice and allows the jury to judge harshly those they wish to scapegoat for the problem of crime. Capital Punishment is racially biased, includes risks in killing innocent people, and is inhumane.  

The race of the defendant is not supposed to influence whether a person is sentenced to death. Throughout history, race has figured heavily in the death penalty. . Before the Civil War, the slave codes mandated execution for any black who murdered a white, but allowed a mere fine for any white who killed a black. Postwar laws continued to require different sentences based on the race of the victim. Today, long after our laws have been stripped of such overt discrimination, the death penalty continues to be reserved overwhelmingly for cases where the victim is white. In the U.S, African Americans make up 12% of the population but 40% of death row. According to the Death Row statistics, if the victim was white the murderer would have one in ten chance of being executed, but if the victim was black the murder would only have one in a hundred chance of being executed. The death penalty must be imposed fairly and with reasonable consistency or not at all.

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The Proponents of Capital Punishment argues that Capital Punishment Deters. Capital Punishment does not deter. A Person who commits murder and other crimes of personal violence are premeditated. When the crime is premeditated, the criminal ordinarily concentrates on escaping detection, arrest, and conviction. The threat of even the severest punishment will not deter those who expect to escape detection and arrest.

        The Death Penalty is so unreliable that Innocent lives are regularly at Risk of Execution. Many Americans have been wrongly convicted of capital crimes and many of these individuals have also been executed. Since 1973, 52 people have been ...

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