Sunday, October 13, 2019
Minors and the Death Penalty Essay -- essays research papers
A.     Should the death penalty be given to minors? The two groups against this issue, are the religious and medical groups. They believe they are too young to know what they have done. The medical groups believe adolescents are less developed than adults and should not be held to the same standards. . The opposing side, held mostly by state officials, feel if they are old enough to commit the crime they, old enough to get the punishment, including death.      B.      The very first execution of a minor was in1642 with Thomas Graunger in Plymouth Colony, Massachesetts. In the three-hundred years since that time, a total of approximately 365 persons have been executed for juvenile crimes, constituting 1.8 percent of roughly twenty-thousand confirmed American executions since 1608. Twenty-two of these executions for juvenile crimes have been imposed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. These twenty-two recent executions of juvenile offenders make up about 2 percent of the total executions since 1976. The death penalty for juvenile offenders has uniquely become an American practice, in that, it appears to have been abandoned by nations everywhere else in large part due to the express provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and of several other international treaties and agreements           C.     The reason this is a moral issue because the death of a human being is a moral issue, and if that human being is not even an adult, than it makes it an atrocity that he/she was put to death by are legal system that in all aspects is placed there for our protection. The punishment is for the criminal, but in reality the only people being punished is the family of the juvenile in question.      D.     Capital punishment is more expensive than a life imprisonment sentence without the opportunity of parole. Florida spent an estimated $57 million on the death penalty from 1973 to 1988 to achieve eighteen executions, that is an average of $3.2 million per execution. It costs six times more to execute a person in Florida than to incarcerate a prisoner for life with no parole. The average cost of a capital trial in Florida is ... ...y between the law breaker and society. Just punishment is binding and not to be mitigated by any utilitarian consideration. Kant also believes in â€Å"blood guilt†and the necessity for cleansing criminal actions.      H.      This issue is pretty touchy to me, because i could support both side of minor being put to death. I agree with if they do the crime, they can do the time, but at the same time they are just little kids and they do not know better. The way I see how this situation can change is that instead of holding the child responsible for the crime hold the parents in contempt. The reason I say this is because a study shown shows that most juvenile convicts come from a broken home. The old saying goes â€Å"monkey see, monkey do.†I believe if these children would have had the chance of growing up in a stable family upbringing, there is a good chance that they would have been upstanding citizens. So my belief may be torn apart on the subject, I'm am going to have to say that I am against the death penalty for minors, because i believe they don not know what they do, because of a lack of immaturity and lack of experience in life.
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