Death Penalty 3 via Dad's Ipad (so cool!)

I didn't even have to read more than a few sentences in the stages of a Death Penalty Trial before I saw something that makes me doubt the guilt of the accuseD. It was something along the lines of death cases being ones where there is immEnse pressure on the police toncatch the murderer. The more pressure there is, the more rushed the police will be and therefore they will take shortcuts or flat out cheat the system by putting innocent people to their deaths.
Uckily, the jury has to sit on these caseS for a month so ther is plenty of time to really contemplate the severity and the necessity of this punishment, although who knows what kind of people are in this jury and if they care or are invested in justice at all. In theory these steps of process seem like they would work really well, but I feel that when deciding whether or not to give the death sentence the jury will not presume a defendant innocent until proven guilty. I think the jury is most likely to presume guilty and wait to find out just HOW guilty the defendant is. The jury is only human after all, and I don't blame them for thinking this way because anyone would, it's just that a human with flAws shouldn't get to pick death.
The methods of execution disgust me. I was literally wrinkling my face up as if there was a terrible smell coming from the screen.
1. Hanging: This is terrifying. It's so medieval I can't believe it's still a choice in some states. It's inhumane because it will cause severe emotional damage because of the nerves and anxiety upon getting the black bag over his head. It's completely unreliable and everything has to be perfect or else the person will be in a lot of pain and anguish before he dies. This is not ok to put a human being through.
2. Firing Squad: Imagine if that first shot was the blank shot? How would one feel, unable to see, practically dying of anxiety and hearing the shot fire, but not knowing why one is still living? That is something that is traumatic enough to literally gray the hair on one's head. This technique is inhumane.
3. Electrocution: While reading the passage explaining this method of murder I thought about the Green Mile and the execution scene in that movie. Seeing it fictionalized with special effects is bad enough even if I know it was fake, but to think that it actually has happened in reality blows my mind. How do the executioners and the people who set up the chair and the sponge and the witnesses feel when witnesses this graphic death? Real people have gone through that pain, and no one deserves to have to die such a painful and cruel death. Not even a criminal.
4. Gas Chamber: What are we, Nazis? Who in their right mind would employ this method? It obviously puts innocent people at risk when they have to clean up the body and there are still fume remenants in the chamber. It seems like the trend of these execution methods are to 'accidentally-on purpose' put the death row inmates in the most amount of pain and terror as possible. That's cruel and unusual and it puts everyone who condones it on the same level as the murderer.
5. Lethal Injection: I'm still anti-death penalty, but this method seems like the most humane. At least the inmates are anesthitized, but there is still that emotional anxiety of going to the injection room, being strapped down,and being prodded by untrained people who may inadvertently cause extreme pain. To top that all off, we saw in the documentary about Clifford Boggess that sometimes inmates are sent to the injection room, strapped down, and then at the last second delayed only to come back again and again not knowing if they're going to die or be saved temporarily. It's torturous. Some would probably say the prisoner deserves that turbulent emotional damage for his crime, but I still think that it is not ok to treat people that way, guilty or not. We have brains that allow us to rise above the primitive natures of the Amygdala, but we sometimes choose not to use our given capacity for empathy. It's sad.
California, Texas, and Florida (in that order) have significantly higher amounts of inmates on Death Row than the other states. Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Masschusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin do not have the death penalty (and are therefore are lead by rightheaded people). Only 11 states have more black inmates than white inmates. That surprises me, actually. California has the most women on death row, which isn't surprising because they have the most inmates anyways. There are hardly any women on death row, there are mostly only men. There are some juveniles that have been executed, but only 16 and older. There can't be many statistics about them because their identities have to be protected since they were minors. 4 states do not have an option for life without parole. The most commonly used method of execution is largely lethal injection. Curretn Illinois policy says it's ok to execute people with mental retardation, one must be 18 or older to get death, and life without parole can be given. As of 9/08 I think Texas has executed the most people, second most is Virginia. Mostly whites have been exectued, in Virginia it's pretty even between blacks and whites. In both other ethnicities don't compare. Texas only uses injection and Virginia uses electrocution and injection.
After considering this data it seems to me that the death penalty is definitely sexist, but less racist than i thought it was. Hardly any women are ever executed or put on death row whereas many men are. I don't know if this is because men commit more violent crimes than women or if juries are more likely to vote for men to get death. Surprisingly, though, more white people than any other minorities are executed and sentenced when just averaging out all the results. Thankfully, most states choose lethal injection as the method of execution. This is not humane, but it is the best of all the evils.
The updated data reconfirms my belief that the death penalty is racist. If a white person is killed by a black person, the black person is much more likely to get the death sentence than a white person who kills a black person. Economically, the death row and executions cost more than tax dollars than the life sentence costs. Therefore, the death penalty is a waste of money. Race plays a huge part in the sentencing. There is not enough minority representation in the courts. This data says that as a country, we are pretty much equally in favor and not in favor of the death penalty. And there is a percentage of people with no opinion. The opinion is a mere 1 percent higher for not in favor of the death penalty. I think the death penalty center is against the death penalty judging by their reports and the facts they choose to represent. I think it is very convincing because it confirms my own previous beliefs. I like most anything that will qualify my views. I don't think anymore information is necessary because this data is very thorough.

Clifford Boggess

After watching the documentary on Clifford Boggess' death row case I felt the familiar feeling I get after watching an E!Insider Special on Charles Manson. To sum it up it feels like, 'This person is seriously a psychopath.'
I'm not really partial to the mitigating or the aggravating factors of this case because I still believe that the death penalty is wrong no matter what. What I am partial to is the fact that Boggess came from a family with a history of mental illness, an uncle who was also a criminal and a mother who had drug and alcohol problems along with abusing her children. His childhood was rocky and traumatic. There was no stability in his life. He was shipped off from an irresponsible and abusive mother to an adoptive family that couldn't take care of him and then sent him to live with some other relatives. This lack of stability in the earliest years of childhood is one piece of a recipe that spells criminal or murderer or just plainly to a dysfuntional adult. In Boggess' case it obviously lead to murder.
We have to take into consideration the psychological factors and the biological factors and the environmental factors in order to evaluate Boggess not for the death penalty, but as a human being. In some regards I sympathize with him because he is probably a sociopath, and that is unfortunate. I wonder what it would be like to grow up without emotions or a sense of anything central to human behavior.
                                               Anyways, Boggess was a murderer and he was executed (wrongfully) so there's no point in studying what created a murderer because he'll never get to sit on Freud's couch. He would have never been fit to be released back into society because he was a sociopath and everyone could tell that he may have convinced himself that he was human, but on the inside it just wasn't possible. Taking into consideration his value as a Christian and an artist is a useless sentiment as well. There are enough Christians in the world and most of them aren't cold blooded murderers. There are enough artists in the world as well who are much better painters than Boggess. Even some people in this school are much better artists than Boggess was, although that is subjective. He has no value as either of these things, but he has value as a human being. I don't know how his lawyers overlooked that little factoid. He was a human being and so are his executers and so were the men he murdered. This puts everyone on an equal plane unless one counts Sociopath as a different level, (which I kind of do). The point is, Boggess took life away from a human and is therefore being punished for it in jail. A life's sentence would suffice. Even though he was having the time of his life in prison, he has to live with being a sociopathic psychokiller. The executioner won't be punished by taking life and that is NOT fair. It's not moral. It's not just. It's nothing but a pathetic attempt to help the society feel clean again and to enable the families to grieve improperly.
                I've basically argued everything against Boggess that can possibly be said, but the fact is that he is a person. No one person has the right to take another person's life away on a whim like this. The execution was wrong.