"Should the government put people to death? Does the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution allow it? Does the death penalty deter crime? Does it discriminate against minorities?" states Patricia Smith from UpFront Magazine in the article "To Kill or Not to Kill?". These questions are just some of the debates that have been discussed for about 40 years. The Death Penalty is a punishment in which a person is put to death. Now, it is being thought of differently since a couple of lethal injections have gone terribly wrong. For example in Oklahoma State Penitentiary, Clayton Lockett, accused with murder, started "kicking, twitching, and writhing and moaning with agony" when he was given the injection. This was supposed to include a sedative, but it didn't work. In Arizona, Joseph R. Wood had more than 640 gasps before he died. Is the death penalty on its way out?
Throughout the article, Patricia Smith describes the movement to stop the death penalty, from protests to Supreme Court rulings. "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?"says a sign during a protest at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008. Smith includes this because it expresses the movement it one sentence. Another piece of evidence that shows the same notion is, that the percentage of Americans that believe that the Death Penalty is right has fallen to 64% from 80% in 1999, and now 19 states have banned it. This is a step in the right direction. Although Smith's article is objective, there is a lot more evidence for the anti-death penalty side, making the article seem biased towards this opinion. However, I think it's not the author, but the debate that is biased.
After reading this article, I have realized that many big debates or disagreements in the world, including the death penalty, are decided not through argument and constant disagreement, but through the general public. If a person who has no previous knowledge of the debate is given the two sides, he/she will pick the side with the most evidence and the most common sense. So instead of having 9 supreme judges making all the big decisions, ask the general public, because their opinion is the most valuable of them all.
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ReplyDeleteI find it interesting how you started with quotes from the article that worked as rhetorical questions also. I think that they would really get the reader thinking, like when you quoted " Should the government put people to death?" I wrote about the same article and also found it interesting how you wrote how the question in your intro should be answered in your conclusion.
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