During class we have discussed the death penalty and its justifications, or lack thereof. There are stages in a court case that help determine whether or not someone will receive the death penalty. Some of the stages that protect the rights of the accused are that they are innocent until proven guilty; there is a stage where the jury decides whether or not there is enough proof to accuse someone before even deciding whether or not they should receive the death penalty, which is called a criminal hearing. They have to be determined guilty without a reasonable doubt. After determining guilt or innocence, the jurors are tested to see whether or not they can choose if the accused should receive the death penalty without bias towards the accused, the prosecutor or their opinion of the death penalty. During this decision, the jury is required to consider the defendants background such as traumatic incidents or childhood, or some form of mental retardation. The defendant is also protected in these stages by allowing for there to be a new trial if the accused felt there was not sufficient evidence or that there was “juror misconduct,” which is when the jury favors one side. If they don’t want a new trial, the defendant can appeal or try to get clemency in order to not receive the death penalty. In my opinion, all of these stages do help to determine that a person is guilty. There is no question when there is the rule of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury is required to not convict someone if they are even the slightest bit unsure. While it is difficult to prove sometimes whether or not a jury is favoring one side of the case, the defendant does have options to be fairly judged.
If a defendant is proven guilty and given the death sentence there are several ways in which they can be executed. In my opinion, being executed by hanging or by firing squad are very inhumane. Sometimes, when hung, their neck does not fully break and they slowly die by asphyxiation. When killed by a firing squad, the shooter can sometimes miss the heart, by intention or by accident, and the prisoner would then slowly bleed to death. Not only are these methods inhumane, but they are unnecessary. I would say both of these should be considered cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment because we have the technology needed to execute people in an efficient and humane way, such as lethal injection.
I looked at several states for their information on their death penalty and found that Illinois does not have a death penalty. Since 1976, only 12 people have been executed versus 475 executions in Texas who has the death penalty. In Texas, out of the 321 people on Death Row, only 10 are women. This is very interesting, but at the same time, understandable. People tend to sympathize with women more than with men. What really strikes me is that Texas has a murder rate of 5 per 100,000 and Illinois is higher with a murder rate of 5.5 per 100,000. Illinois method is injection if they were ever to use the death penalty, and it is interesting that Missouri’s method is by injection or gas and it is the choice of the prisoner as to which they will receive. In comparison to Texas, Missouri has a murder rate of 7 per 100,000, yet only 68 people have been executed since 1976 and there are currently 50 people on death row. Part of this that the statistics don’t always take into account is that there is a big population difference between Texas and Missouri. The one thing that remains consistent in all states is that there are more men than women on death row.
Looking further at Illinois, their death penalty requirements include felonies, killing children, murdering with intention and a plan, killed in order to obtain money or prevent the victim from testifying, if the murderer injured the victim to the point of death, the victim was a disabled person, and even if the intentions of the killer were terrorism. I do think that these statues of the death penalty are justifiable because they all require for the killer to have an intention to kill, to harm someone incapable of defense, or in order to have personal gain. All of those acts listed are reason enough for someone to be subject to the death penalty. However, I can see as to why these statues would make the death penalty questionable in Illinois and eventually made them abolish it altogether. One reason is that the death penalty cannot be biased towards putting those to death who were disabled or children, because any other person killed, such as an adult, is of equal value. Also, it is hard to prove intention, which is what a lot of the statues are based on. Lastly, killing someone by injuring them to death may go against intention. If the intention was to break their arm by hitting them with a baseball bat and they then fell down stairs which broke their neck and killed them, is it really the person with the baseball bat’s fault? Their intention was to break their arm, not kill them. So are they guilty or not? I think that question was brought up a lot in cases, which was another cause for Illinois to no longer use the death penalty.
Something that is interesting is that in all of the states, the largest race to be executed is white which is usually presumed to be black. However, the largest race of victims whose perpetrators were executed is also white, meaning that courts are more sympathetic towards white victims and more likely to send whoever killed them to death. Looking at a different chart, there were 17 white people sent to death for killing a black person, versus the 255 black people sent to death for killing a white person. These statistics are another reason why Illinois and other states no longer have the death penalty; there is a prepositioned bias in deciding whether or not to give someone the death penalty.
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