Argument for The Abolishment of Capital Punishment - amazonia.fiocruz.br

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Don't have an account? This chapter argues that the collateral consequences of the death penalty have implications for human rights. The authors base their argument on the fact that trauma is a public health issue, and the death penalty is a trauma-organized system that gives rise to many secondary victims. A primary goal of public health is to intervene on a vector i. In terms of collateral consequences, this chapter addresses secondary victims, beginning with family members of the defendant and victim, members of the execution team, witnesses of the execution, and capital jurors. This chapter concludes with an exploration of U. Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Argument for The Abolishment of Capital Punishment.

Our sacred trust is to keep people safe, to do justice for all, and to ensure that the people who commit crimes receive fair and just punishment. We are responsible for reflecting the values of our community and for recognizing the self-evident truth that all people, from the most righteous to the most depraved, are our brothers and sisters.

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To do justice, the people of Virginia have entrusted us with the ultimate power: to demand that, for the most serious of crimes, the Commonwealth put people to death. Some people refer to this death-dealing by a polite, Latinate euphemism: capital punishment. We call capital punishment what it is: the state-sanctioned, premeditated homicide of its own people. This premeditated homicide is immoral and debases us all. Twenty-two of our sister states have shut down their death chambers, and yet in modern times, Virginia has been particularly ready to kill. Since the reinstatement of the modern death-penalty scheme inVirginia has killed people by electrocution and poisoning, more than any state but Texas.

Lauren A. Ricciardelli

Shutting down our death chamber would be particularly fitting, since Virginia, as the Mother of States, in hosted the first execution in the English colonies, a year after settlers landed in Jamestown and a year before the first enslaved Africans landed article source Old Point Comfort. We take this stand at a particularly important time, because in some quarters the death machine has sped up. Amid the grim march of loss in —from war, murder, addiction, mishap, despair and the incomprehensibly lethal scourge of COVID—17 deaths largely escaped notice: the 17 men who, in a sick pantomime of medical treatment, were wheeled to their deaths and intravenously poisoned in the name of public safety.

Of those 17 men, ten died at the hands of the United States government which, following a pause of 17 years, has engaged in an orgy of executions unprecedented since the Second World War. The death penalty may have made some sense inwhen it would have been impossible to imprison someone securely for life.

It may aCpital even seemed socially beneficial in the same way that leeches, bleeding and doses of mercury were considered medically beneficial. Those days have passed; the death penalty does nothing to keep us safe, and it degrades us just as the crimes of the executed depraved them and devastated their victims. Proponents of execution argue that the threat of death deters people from committing capital crimes.

We see no evidence to support that argument. Almost without exception, the people whom we prosecute are not even aware what penalty their crimes carry, let alone what blurry line separates life from Punishmennt. Proponents of execution make emotional arguments about the heinousness of the crimes for which people are sentenced to die. Those proponents are right about the facts, but they are wrong that the answer is death. Our hearts break for the Argument for The Abolishment of Capital Punishment of violent crime.

Our calling is to protect our fellow Virginians and to punish those who harm them. But all people sentenced to die—assuming that they are guilty, which many are not, as countless exonerations have shown—have committed abhorrent and vile crimes that cause us to despair about the inhumanity that people can inflict on each other.

But the cheerleaders for state-sponsored death cannot show that the crimes for which the state kills people are consistently more heinous or vile than the crimes for which people are sentenced to serve life in prison rather than to die. In fact, the most striking characteristic of those who have been singled out Argument for The Abolishment of Capital Punishment die is that they are damaged and broken people, are disproportionately African Americans, and their victims have been disproportionately white. Indeed, Samuel Little, who confessed to killing 93 vulnerable, forgotten women, most of them African American like him, was sentenced to life in prison and died without fanfare on December 30 in a California prison.

Were we to gouge out the eyes of robbers, cut off the hands of thieves, break the legs of drunk drivers, or publicly whip shoplifters, our society from top to bottom would cry out in outrage, and they would be right.]