Example research essay topic: Criminal Justice System Cruel And Unusual Punishment - 1,077 words

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Death Penalty An eye for an eye, a life for a life? Does this philosophy hold true in the twentieth century? Is the death penalty a Cruel and Unusual punishment or is iknow a necessary tool in the war on crime? With the increase in crime and violence in our society due not only to gang and drug activities, but also psychotic murderers, our criminal justice system must decide whether or not death as a form of criminal punishment is economical, non-discriminatory, and a deterrence factor of criminal activity.

Although it may seem to many people expensive to keep a murderer in prison for life, the fact is it is now actually more costly to execute the inmate. Atone time it would have been cheaper to carry out the penalty of death, but no WWI th all of the costs including the financial expense and the wear and tear our courts and prisons a system of capital punishment is considerably more expensive than a criminal justice system without capital punishment (National Law Journal, 1993). The costly aspect is not the feedings and other upkeep's ofthe prisoner but the judicial and correctional processes. Ordinarily criminal cases, including murder cases, are resolved by guilty pleas and without expense of a trial. All capital cases, by contrast, require jury trials. These trials are longer, more complex and more expensive than those inter cases, including other murder cases.

Although defendants are able to plead guilty to capital murder, few do. The fact is the only time that a defendant pleads guilty is when they will receive some type of leniency, such as in the degree of the charges, the dismissal of other charges, or an expectation of favorable consideration in sentencing (The Death Penalty, 1989). When this bargaining occurs it usually results in a crime which in longer a capital one. Even those who do plead guilty, however, will still have a jury trial on the issue of penalty. Not only do jury trials usually have to take place twice, but in capital cases they will also be longer and more expensive. One reason they anymore costly is that the jury selection process will be longer and involve more jurors due to the opposition many prospective jurors have to the death penalty (The Death Penalty, 1987).

Opposition to the death penalty is not a ground for disqualifying a juror from the trial unless the juror is one-hundred percent against it and under no condition will vote for death. As a consequence, a considerable amount of time is spent with the lawyers questioning available jurors. Another problem with these capital cases is the amount of publicity received. This further complicates matters for the fact that when choosing aries must be made up of people whose views on the trial have not been tainted. To achieve this, often the trial will be relocated to a neighboring county, or jurors may be summoned from another county to attend the trial in the county where theorie occurred (The Death Penalty, 1987). When the trial has concluded and the sentence is death, the case will be appealed.

In fact, most statutes provide for automatic appeal of death sentences (The Death Penalty, 1989). The problem with the appeals process is that in the capital punishment system it is much more costly. The time surrounding an execution, shortly before and until some time after is an extraordinarily difficult time in the prisons. The execution weighs heavily on all the inmates and guards, creating major and minor problems throughout the system (National Law Journal, 1993). All of these problems combined make it seem easier just to set the inmate free. Of the 3, 859 persons executed for all crimes since 1930, 54. 6 percent have been black or members of other racial minority groups (The Death Penalty, 1987).

As census data clearly reveal, blacks in American society have consistently represented approximately 10 12 percent of the United States population (The Death Penalty, 1987). Of course, these statistics alone do not reveal elements of judicial bias in the administration of criminal law. What is a tissue is whether, among persons who have been convicted of capital crimes, a statistically significantly higher proportion of blacks than whites, all other things being relatively equal, are differentially sentenced to death. In one of the early studies on race and capital punishment, it was pointed out that the race of both victim and the offender may be an important variable in understanding the penalties applied to homicides (The Death Penalty, 1987). Using 220 homicide cases from Richmond, Virginia, from 1930 to 1939, and 330 homicides from five counties in North Carolina from 1930 to 1940, it was hypothesized that cases of black offenders whose victims were white would believed as the most serious homicides, followed by white offenders / white victims, black offenders / black victims, and white offenders / black victims (The Death Penalty, 1987). It is not the presence of the nonracial factor of a contemporaneous offense that affects the decision to impose the death penalty more frequently on blacks.

Rather, it is the racial factor of the relationship between the defendant and victim that results in the use of the death penalty (The Death Penalty, 1987). As far as the deterrence of capital punishment, there has been two empirical questions raised about the death penalty Is it a deterrent at all, ever, to anyone? Is it a more effective deterrent than long-term imprisonment (The Death Penalty, 1987)? One main group of study conducted by Thorsten Sellin exhibited that (a) the evidence showed that the (threat of the) death penalty was not a better deterrent than (the threat of) long-term imprisonment, or (b) there was no evidence that either penalty (or the threat thereof) was a better deterrent than theater (The Death Penalty, 1987). Another group of studies conducted by Ehrlich concluded that seven or eight fewer murders would have occurred if one execution per year over the period that he studied (1933 1969) would have taken place (The Death Penalty, 1987).

These findings provoked much controversy. With the low deterrence of and high cost of capital punishment our criminal justice system must make their decision on whether or not to continue with what some call cruel and unusual punishment. Also, considering the obvious discriminatory data, this system must have a major overhaul. In my opinion the death penalty is a costly ineffective punishment for serious crimes as Image given examples above.

Research essay sample on Criminal Justice System Cruel And Unusual Punishment