Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Barack Obama and the Death Penalty

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/12/obama.death.penalty.ap/

Barack Obama believes that the death penalty is in serious need of reform. He states simply that "Who gets a sentence of life and who gets death is often a matter of random luck, of politics, of geography, even a matter of racism. Mistakes can occur at every level of the process." There are too many wrongful convictions in America for whatever reason, he says, and there is just no way to look at a situation of someone's wrongful death in a good way. He has taken stands in many states saying that the death penalty is not only wrong and possibly faulty, but cruel and unusual punishment as well.
However, Obama does believe that there is some need for capital punishment in our legal system, and is therefore leading reforms. He proposed that all interrogations for capital punishment be video monitored because in recent years it has been discovered that many people who were on death row were there because their interrogations were being handled improperly by the police including 13 inmates in Illinois n 2003.
I believe that the death penalty is something that our country can do without. I do not think this because i believe that it is too harsh of a punishment, but because i believe it is too easy of one. I think that if someone did something as unspeakable as something they would be put on death row for, then they should have to live their whole lives living the consequence. I do not believe they should be offered the easy way out which at that point would only be death. Abolishing the death penalty would also get rid of the problems we are faced with as mentioned earlier with people being executed only to find out later that they were innocent.

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