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... ate with McVeigh's fingerprint, and the rented Ryder truck used for the bombing. Other examples of criminals who have suffered capital punishment include Rolando Cruz and another Chicago man. They were both sentenced to death in 1985 for the abduction, death, and murder of a ten-year-old little girl named Jeanine Nicarico. Because the prosecution had based its case on a vision statement, the conviction was overturned. There was another man who had actually confessed to the murder, however, he was never allowed to testify, and Cruz was convicted again on the evidence of a dream regarding the crime that he confessed he had.
Cruz's conviction was overturned once more and it wasn't until a third trial that DNA evidence cleared his name. Rolando Cruz was finally acquitted in November 1995. After eleven years, he is finally free. On June 13, 1997, ten minutes past midnight, a former Ku Klux Klan member was killed just outside Mobile, Alabama by high voltage which slammed into his brain. His name was Henry Francis Hays. He was convicted in 1981 for abducting, brutally beating and cutting, then strangling a black teenage boy named Michael Donald after a jury failed to convict him.
This was supposed to be a show of strength. Hays' friend and accomplice got life imprisonment. It took sixteen years to finally execute Hays, and the execution went virtually unnoticed. Only ten people gathered outside the prison gates, and the press barely covered it. Federal prisoners currently on death row include the marijuana grower David Rolando Chandler who was convicted in May 1991 for hiring a man to kill a police informer and Juan Raul Garza who was given the death sentence in 1993 because of his connection to three murders committed in Brownsville. Cory Johnson, Richard Tipton, and James Roane Jr.
are three crack dealers that were sentenced to death in 1988 for a string of murders designed to expand their territories. Other death row inmates include Louis Jones who was sentenced to death in 1995 for kidnapping, raping, and murdering a female soldier from a Texas military base and Anthony George Battle who was already serving life in prison when he killed a corrections officer. The other names are Orlando Hall, Bruce Webster, Len Davis, Paul Hardy and Bountaem Chanthadara. As executions increase, so do the charges that the death penalty is unfair. "Factors such as race and poor lawyering can be as decisive as a murder's seriousness. " An overwhelming majority of capital cases involve crimes committed against people who are white.
Blacks who kill whites are sentenced to death at a far higher rate than whites who kill blacks. In the U. S. , the chief objection to capital punishment has been that it has always been used unfairly, in at least three major ways. First, women are rarely sentenced to death and executed, even though 20 percent of all homicides in recent years have been committed by women. Second, a disproportionate number of nonwhites are sentenced to death and executed. Third, poor and friendless defendants, those with inexperienced or court-appointed counsel, are most likely to be sentenced to death and executed.
Defenders of the death penalty, however, believe that discrimination is not a sufficient reason for abolishing the death penalty. Although people like President Clinton, the Supreme Court, and many federal state lawmakers back capital punishment, the American Bar Association believes that executions should stop until reforms are enacted. No one today questions the necessity for punishing criminals by depriving them of their freedom for periods of time, however, there is ardent discussion regarding the topic of the death sentence. Questions such as when, how, and to whom it should be applied are crucial when discussing the subject. The very existence of capital punishment is, in many occasions, questioned. The people who defend it believe it is legitimate and necessary, and those who oppose it believe it is unjustifiable and outdated.
Many times the question is life or death, mercy or vengeance. Is capital punishment meant to benefit society or provide comfort to the victimized? It is an international ongoing debate. Some people think that capital punishment serves to remind us of the moral order in our law, that some animals need killing, if only to remind the rest of us animals how to live.
Other people's opinions differ, however. They believe that life without parole is, in some ways, more retributive than death. It forces the convict to accept his punishment for the rest of his life, and it makes us morally energetic about punishment. There are, on the other hand, some Americans that want to see more executions with fewer appeals and delays, especially those who live in the "Death Belt" states of Texas, Florida, Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, and Alabama, which together make up for seventy-eight percent of the executions in America.
Other folks feel that death is the most irrevocable of all sanctions and that they should use the usual alternative to the death penalty which is long-term or life imprisonment. These people emphasize the fact that there is possibility of perjured testimony, mistaken honest testimony and human error. There is no way of knowing how many innocent persons have been executed. The death penalty decisions must be unanimous by the convicting jury. The fundamental questions raised by the death penalty are whether it is an effective obstacle to violent crime, and whether it is more effective than the alternative of long-term imprisonment. Defenders of the death penalty insist that because taking an offender's life is a more severe punishment than any prison term, it must be the better deterrent.
Supporters also argue that it is better to kill the criminal before he can commit another crime or murder, even while he or she is incarcerated. Those who argue against the death penalty as an obstacle to crime so that the adjacent states, in which one has a death penalty and the other does not, show no significant long-term differences in the murder rate; states that use the death penalty seem to have a higher number of homicides than states that do not use it; states that abolish and then reintroduce the death penalty do not seem to show any significant change in the murder rate; and no change in the rate of homicides in a given city or state seems to occur following a local execution. Criminologists affirm that there is that no conclusive evidence that exists to show that the death penalty is a more effective impediment to violent crime than long-term imprisonment. There is a margin of more than two-to-one people that support the death penalty.
Seventy-four percent of the people are in favor of the death penalty for individuals convicted of serious crimes, but only forty-five percent think it deters people from committing crimes. A sweeping sixty percent don't think that vengeance is a legitimate reason for killing a murderer. Many court decisions of the 1980 s and early 1990 s have lowered bars to executions. In 1986 the Court ruled that opponents of executions may be barred from juries in murder cases. The following year the Court ruled that the law may be applied to accomplices in crimes that led to murder, then rejected a challenge to capital punishment based on statistics that indicated racial bias in sentencing. In separate decisions in 1989 the Court decided that the death penalty could be applied to those who were mentally retarded or who were underage, but at least 16, at the time of the murder.
In the early 1990 s the trend of Supreme Court rulings was to cut back on the appeals that Death Row inmates could make to the federal courts.
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Research essay sample on Death Row Inmates Sentenced To Death
