Death Penalty In Texas

    The death penalty is an overkill of our society’s morality. Our humanity will be lost if we allow the death penalty. Humanity consists of our ability to have moral considerations towards life which is looking at more than just happiness that utilitarians tend to do. Innocence, being understanding, valuing people and things in life, and being virtuosic are views that keeps our humanity. There comes a time when people act off of emotions and decide to push away their morals.  Some may consider killing someone for their crime, but that makes us just as bad as them. Now, we are the killer. People have impulses that can become irrational and

Since the death penalty was reauthorized in 1976, 1,362 people have been executed, almost exclusively by the states, with most occurring after 1990. Texas has accounted for over one-third of modern executions and over four times as many as Virginia, the state with the second-highest number. The Walls Unit prison in downtown Huntsville, Texas is the nations busiest execution chamber.

On the website Waco Trib, Tommy Witherspoon writes in his article “Pursuit of death penalty slows in McLennan County, Texas”, that the amount of inmates being sentences to death row is dwindling each year in Texas because of the new law enacting the option of life without parole. Life without parole is becoming popular

One of the best reasons I feel that the death penalty is a good thing is that it can deter would-be criminals to commit a crime. Yes people may argue that back then in the old days that didn’t stop them but if you actually look it up the crime rate back then it was not as high as the crime rate now. Would-be criminals would think before they act if they wanted to commit a crime, and I understand that it may not phase them at all but you can’t get rid of all crime it isn’t possible.

However, there are financial and moral obligations to this idea. For the moral part of it, many feel executing a person for a crime is simply inhumane. Not to mention the fact that if the person was truly innocent, the family of the dead relative would be extremely distraught, and there would be a loose convict in the public. As for the financial part of the death penalty, it is quite interesting. It is cheaper for jails to imprison a person for life than it is for the convict to go through the process of the death penalty. When in comparison to a life-sentence in prison in California, the state would save $170 million a year by avoiding the process of the death penalty (Death Penalty). Despite the moral ethics of the problem, it is cheaper and better for the United States to send criminals to

The capital punishment is expensive. It costs more to sentence a prisoner to death than giving him/her life imprisonment. The capital punishment cases have long and complex process. Therefore, they are much more expensive than life imprisonment. Every step is time-consuming and expensive. “The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice (CCFAJ) roughly estimated the capital punishment costs in California. The Commission estimated that California currently spends $137.7 million on death-penalty-related costs each year” (Petersen & Lynch, 2012, para. 19). In Texas, a death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million, which is about three times the cost of imprisonment for life (Death penalty facts, 2013, para. 1). The death penalty is a waste of taxpayer’s money. This is money that could be used for the better of the

The number of criminals on death row has sky rocketed from the 1950’s through the 200’’s. the process of which someone is executed could take decades, but in certain states like Texas a person can be executed soon after they are sentenced to death. Most states use lethal injections when executing someone. This method was picked up by the state of Texas in the late 1970’s and has since been the main method used to kill people on death row. In many cases this method has been botched and resulting things to go worse for the person who is being put to death. They often end up feeling the pain a hundred times worse.

The death penalty is currently being used in 34 states and Texas is one of those 34 states. January 1, 1974, Texas reinstated the death penalty after it was abolished in 1964. When it was abolished any convict that was sentenced to death was removed from death row and basically given life in prison. The very first execution in Texas was on February 8, 1824, which was achieved by the electric chair until 1964. By 1982 the first lethal injection is given here in Texas as the alternative to the electric chair. Once the lethal injection was created the number of executions sky rocketed from 1992-1999. In the 2000s' complications started to interfere with the death penalty. Complications such as, the questioning of the innocence of the convict and the improvement of DNA testing which helped choose if the convict was to be executed or not. Another thing the government would process is if they should be executed even if they have a mental health issue. Many states passed a law that doesn’t

Just a few facts about the death penalty is that 153 people have been exonerated and out of those 153 only twenty of them was because of a DNA evidence. Also six states have completely removed the death penalty such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois, New Mexico, Maryland, and Connecticut. The death penalty is also called a capital crime, killing those for things that they have committed such as rape or killing another human being. One of the main reasons the death penalty should not be allowed is because it is like an easy way out of a punishment, a way to not serve a lifetime of a sentence that should be served. That way they have time to consider what they have done and how they hurt that person or their family member. You do not have to use death penalty as a way to show you are tough on crime, putting someone in jail for as long as possible with what they did is just as good. Making sure they get the time they deserve is good enough. “My major problem is that it is impossible to separate the death penalty from revenge; which is hardly a worthy substitute for justice.”(Gates, 2010). The death penalty is a way to get justice for what they have done, but also a way for revenge to be in the place of justice. A person could want revenge for what that person has done instead of clarity, they want to get revenge for what had happened to a loved one that they do not tend to think it is the right way to get justice for their loved one, when in all

The death penalty has deeper implication in our society, we are unconsciously teaching young children, if someone does something to you, it is ok to do something back, because the government does the same thing. People grow up and began to believe if the

This is one of the most important aspects of offering the death penalty. The victim and their families have no choice or control about the crime that is committed. Allowing them to decide the fate of the perpetrator gives the opportunity for restitution and closure if they so choose. Some argue that in extreme cases like murder there is no amount of restitution to compensate the actual loss, this shouldn’t limit the victims and their families from having the death penalty as an option. Supporting the death penalty as a deterrent for criminals, this graph from “Does Capital Punishment Deter Crime?” by Jay Johansen clearly shows the correlation between the execution rate and the homicide rate from 1950 to 1996. When more executions are performed less homicides are committed. Left of this graph is the rate of homicides and executions per every million people, the bottom is the year.

"In Texas, a death penalty case costs taxpayers an average of $2.3 million, about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years". In terms of cost, capital punishment costs more than a lifetime of imprisonment. The government has to pay more money for a person who was sentenced to death because of more trials, which would result to more fees. The death penalty requires a lot more trials because a life will be taken away. The government could save about $500,000 from each prisoner by putting them in

There have been people who have claimed that the death penalty is a too easy way out for prisoners. They state that the people should think about their crimes while they spend the rest of their lives behind bars. The real fact is that none of the prisoners would think about the crimes that they have committed. They get three meals per day and some jails have gyms for the prisoners to spend their free time at. The prisoners with a life sentence will probably die happy behind bars and probably will never think of the people that they have raped, killed, tortured, or scared.

One reason why people either agree or disagree with the death penalty is because of the cost. Contrary to popular belief it is actually cheaper to imprison inmates for life than to execute them. According to a series of recent studies housing inmate for life without parole is ten of millions of dollars cheaper than executing them. The reason why it’s cheaper to house the inmates instead of executing them is because of the unique status of the death penalty within the US justice system. The Constitution requires a long and complex judicial process for capital cases, including several levels of mandatory review after a death sentence is issued. These appeals process takes decades to complete. Since most of all states have had budget cuts and funding has been decreased it is now harder for states to get the required necessities to execute prisoners. So an increasing number politicians are now considering abolishing capital punishment in favor of life imprisonment, out of financial necessity. “It's 10 times more

While capital punishment has been debated for years, it is clearly a useful and necessary deterrent. Some would argue against this saying that it is unethical and too expensive to continue using, and in the last 15 years the number of death sentences has declined rapidly. If the death penalty is continued to be used less and less it will lose it deterrent value because criminals will not feel threatened to be