Why do some states in America have the death penalty and others don't?
Jeffrey Dubiel is spot on. The United States in not one place with total power vested in the central government. It is a union of 50 sovereign states plus the District of Columbia. The tenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution speaks to state autonomy: “ The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Judicial sentencing is reserved to the states and each state decides how it will sentence those convicted of crimes.By the way, the federal government also imposes the death penalty as does the U.S. military. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was executed at a federal penitentiary in 2001. Private John Bennett was the last military member to receive capital punishment. In April 1961, Bennett was executed via hanging at Fort Leavenworth. Thirty-one states allow capital punishment in their sentencing guidelines while 19 states and the District of Columbia do not. A 2017 Gallup poll shows that 55% of Americans approve of capital punishment while 41% disapprove.
Why is the USA the only Western country with the death penalty?
While the death penalty is technically legal in the majority of states, it rarely occurs, and even when it does, it usually isn’t acted upon.In 2016 and 2017, there were 20 executions in the U.S. for each year. These executions are concentrated among just a handful of states. It’s not so much a national issue as a localized, southern one. So it is a small, isolated problem but is still nonetheless barbaric.Laws are often poor indicators of reality.In the U.S., for example, church and state are legally separated, yet the U.S. is one of the most religious developed countries. In contrast, Norway doesn’t have the separation of church and state, yet it has one of the lowest church attendance records in the world and is one of the least religious.You have to look to deeper to see what’s actually going on. Laws are often passed in response to a problem, and if there’s not much of a problem, then there’s little incentive for people to mobilize themselves to change the law. So you get these vestigial laws that stay on the books.The U.S. is also not the only “western” country that uses the death penalty.
Thesis statement for the death penalty?
In the judicial court of law, the death penalty should most definitely be pursued because it gives the families of murder victims absolute closure and will prevent any further wrongdoings from the premesis of the jail to ever be carried out by an outside source in public american society. Throughout history, there have been multiple instances in which a person imprisioned in jail found a way through letters and phone calls (both of which are infact allowed in jail) to contact allies and outside sources who are willing to commit further crimes on their behalf. Billions of dollars are collected from taxes taken from mainstream American society who follow the law and pay the extra money to the government based on the cost and quality of their main assets, such as a home or multiple vehicles. A fraction of those taxes are used to PAY for criminals who have done horrendus crimes and have ruined the lives of their victims, dangerous pedophiles who cannot be trusted to be exposed to the rest of the world and must be locked up. Our prisions are far too overcrowded, and require a lot of money in order to pay for the staff who work there and the living and basic sanitary conditions for the criminals. Why should a murderer deserve to live himself when he stole the life and inflicted terrible deaths on his victim(s). How would these people "learn" from their mistakes if they are trapped in jail for the rest of their lives and have to be PAID for by perfectly innocent citizens who might be just scraping by, or stark poor? A serial killer doesn't deserve to live where he could easily slip a shif down a fellow prisioners back, where he is only taking up space in a jail cell, simply waiting to die. Inflicting the death sentance on the people who carry out awful crimes will only help our society, and teach others out there a simple lesson of letting an innocent man who might be vulnerable to a killer keep what he deserves most: his life. I hope that this is of help to u. i understand this is far more than what u asked for, a simple thesis statement, but i suppose i got carried away. I feel very strongly on this topic as i have read a book in which a man in prison who faced the death sentance but managed to avoid it convinced his own mother from his jail cell to pay for a couple of hit men to destroy one of his past enemies. I hope you get a good grade on ur paper and i wish you all the best. xoxoxo, Adele
How many countries still have the death penalty as of 2013?
Fewer and fewer (57) have the death penalty for ordinary crimes: AFGHANISTAN ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA BAHAMAS BAHRAIN BANGLADESH BARBADOS BELARUS BELIZE BOTSWANA CHAD CHINA COMOROS CONGO (Democratic Republic) CUBA DOMINICA EGYPT EQUATORIAL GUINEA ETHIOPIA GUATEMALA GUINEA GUYANA INDIA INDONESIA IRAN IRAQ JAMAICA JAPAN JORDAN KOREA (North) KUWAIT LEBANON LESOTHO LIBYA MALAYSIA NIGERIA OMAN PAKISTAN PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY QATAR SAINT KITTS & NEVIS SAINT LUCIA SAINT VINCENT & GRENADINES SAUDI ARABIA SINGAPORE SOMALIA SOUTH SUDAN SUDAN SYRIA TAIWAN THAILAND TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO UGANDA UNITED ARAB EMIRATES UNITED STATES OF AMERICA VIET NAM YEMEN ZIMBABWE Another 8 have the death penalty for crimes under military circumstances: BOLIVIA BRAZIL CHILE EL SALVADOR FIJI ISRAEL KAZAKHSTAN PERU On the other hand, 141 nations are abolitionist in law or practice.
Capital Punishment: How do Americans feel about the United States being included with Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, and Iraq as the world's most prolific executioners?
The United States is not anywhere close to being as prolific an executioner as any of those four countries. By an order of magnitude.Saudi Arabia: 1 out of every 351,295 people executed per year.China: Unknown rate, "thousands" executed per year, at least 1 out of every 683,742 people executed per year (assuming only 2,000 executed per year).Iran: 1 out of every 260,587 people executed per year.Iraq: 1 out of every 287,257 people executed per year.USA: 1 out of every 7,473,694 people executed per year.Sources: Death penalty statistics, country by country | visualisation and data , CIA World factbook for population data.For completeness's sake, I should mention that while the USA is nowhere near as prolific an executioner as those four countries, we execute far more people than most other democratic countries that also use the death penalty, such as Japan (1 in 18,131,379), India (1 in 1.25 billion!), Indonesia or South Korea (14 death sentences combined, but no executions in 2012). Taiwan is the only democratic country that executes more than we (1 out of 3,345,018).For many reasons, I would personally prefer that the U.S.A. abolish the death penalty. Its deterrent effect does not appear to exceed that of life in prison; it is vastly more expensive; modern prison security makes escape so difficult that it's far less likely than executing an innocent person; and our justice system is far too plagued with prejudice, misconduct, and error to be trusted with such a punishment. I believe there are killers who deserve death; I don't understand how someone can read what James Patterson Smith did and not want him removed from the universe and his atoms used for the infinitely higher purpose of fertilizing flowers. But I trust no one, not even myself, to draw a fair and enforceable line between those who deserve death and those who don't.Still, none of that excuses slinging around propaganda like the U.S. being as prolific an executioner as Saudi Arabia, China, Iraq, or Iran. We are not.
(death penalty) how to rebuttal a counterargument?
The Golden Rule encourages truth, honesty fairness, equality, respect, trust, integrity and honour and everything good. There is great wisdom in the application of the golden rule into ones own life. With this in mind, both Torture and the Death Penalty are never an atonement, but simply the most primitive and felonious kind of revenge being only for the satisfaction of irresponsible and irrational human beings, whose intelligence quotient and humaneness lies far below that of the delinquent being tortured or sent from life to death for his/her heinous action. Recently I signed a petition to the United Nations "Worldwide Outlawing and Abrogation of the Torture and the Death Penalty" at Change.org. (If you agree that this inhumanity must be stopped then will you please sign it too?) Much more information is available on this page. http://www.change.org/petitions/worldwid...
Aside from the United States, which other countries approve of the death penalty?
[image-credit: Wikipedia]There are many countries that have death-penalty in principle, i.e. it still exists as a theoretical possibility in their laws. All the red countries do, and in addition the brown countries do; but has not executed anyone during the last decade.This picture may give the impression that capital punishment is common. But that's not the case. It might be more meaningful to look at which countries ACTUALLY execute criminals with any regularity.For example the complete list of countries that executed more than 10 people in 2013 looks like this:China (no official numbers, but thousands)Iran (369)Iraq (169)North Korea (70 official, real numbers likely much higher)Saudi Arabia (79)USA (39)Somalia (34)Sudan (21)Yemen (13)Actual regular use of Capital Punishment is very rare, in practice pretty much limited to less than a dozen countries.USA is the only wealthy democracy that use capital punishment with this high regularity; Japan comes close though (they executed 8 in 2013, which is fairly average for them)