Hi! Today I am here to tell you about the death penalty and why, if given the chance you should vote and rally against it. I have read and researched human rights, racism, the death penalty, and the legal system. This gave me the tools to understand the context of the death penalty in our society. When reading about human rights I learned the many ways that our justice system manipulates and hurts minorities, especially black people. During my research on the death penalty, I discovered exactly how the trials and systems work, which showed me the many loopholes that allow for missteps and false accusations. By understanding all these nuances I can look at the big picture from many different perspectives.
Race and status are huge factors in a death penalty case. Here are some examples; In Texas, over half of the death row population is black, even though black people only make up about 12% of Texas’s overall population. In 2002, in the US, 12 people were executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims. These statistics suggest that the use of the death penalty discriminates based on race. Other statistics show that it also targets people with lower socioeconomic status and mental and physical disorders which is also a very destructive practice. The penalty itself isn’t even that effective. Looking at data, we can see that since 1977 over 80 percent of all executions have occurred in the South, which still has the highest murder rate of the regions in America even with continuous enforcement of the death penalty. The Northeast, the region with the lowest murder rate, has less than 1 percent of the executions in the country meaning that having the death penalty in effect isn’t even helpful.
Now at this point, I have talked about many different statistics and have given you ample reason to trust me. But I can’t close out this speech without telling you just how unethical this practice is. We dismiss what this is doing to our humanity with the excuse that we are removing killers from the world. Just take a minute and think about that. We are “creating justice” by becoming killers ourselves? How can we sit back and watch thousands of lives be destroyed by this? To quote Bryan Stevenson, civil justice advocate “Everyone is more than the worst thing we have ever done.” The death penalty is a very good example of that since we sometimes forget that death penalty prisoners are actually people who are not defined by their crime.Why not, instead of just dismissing the problem with the “out of sight, out of mind” mindset, we get to the bottom of it, set up rehab facilities? We need to think even about our own mental health on this issue. How can we remain happy and content while people are being condemned to death under an unfair system? This is not only an issue of killing people but killing people who haven’t even had a fighting chance to stand up for themselves or to have a fair trial.
If given the chance you should vote to get rid of this unjust and twisted practice. Thank you.
