If you had the choice between life or death, what would you pick? Most likely you would have answered life, but ultimately it shouldn’t be anyone else’s choice but yours.

   It’s your decision, and no one else has a right to end your life so why do we allow people to be sentenced to death? What crime could someone commit that causes them to be worthy of death? The death penalty has been debated for many centuries and is still debated today.

   Ever since the first death penalty laws in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, we’ve been treating criminals as if their life means nothing. Killing a murderer makes you just as bad as them. What gives you the right to control someone’s life? Is it their wealth, gender, race?

    We’ve had revolutions, civil wars, cultural movements, and more proving that that isn’t the case. We’ve proved that there is no “God-given” or divine right that allows anyone to be above the law, which includes killing.

    The death penalty is a violation of human rights. There isn’t any way you can justify that in our nation, the land of the free and the home of the brave, someone doesn’t deserve their own rights.

   Our society was born on the foundation that all men, no matter their actions, are created equal. Capital punishment denies the civil liberties of our democratic society. The death penalty system largely depends on the race of the victim, how much money they have, how good of an attorney they have, and the location of crime.

   It is more likely that a person of color will be executed in comparison to a white person. From 1930 to 1996, 4,220 prisoners were killed in the US; about 53% of them were black.

  Twenty-nine states currently have capital punishment as a legal penalty. New Jersey is not one of them. From 1976 to 2019, Texas executed 566 people. The most in the country. The second highest was Virginia with 133 executions.

   Since 1973, more than 156 people have been removed from the death row because of false claims and innocence. This means that across the country, 10% of people on the death row are exonerated. Capital punishment is not only cruel from a human rights stance but also goes against the 8^th amendment.

   The Bill of Rights states that any form of cruel and unusual punishment is illegal; it is a right that all humans should have. Capital punishment also denies the due process of law, another basic right for humans. It denies individuals the chance to benefit from either new laws or evidence which could warrant the reversal of his or her conviction.

   This could be the difference between life and death.

   Not only is the death penalty morally wrong, but economically foolish. Why waste even more of the money of taxpayers? Since the death penalty has no major public safety benefit, there is no use is paying extra money if it isn’t keeping anyone safe.

   The FBI has found that the states where the death penalty is in use have the highest murder rates. Along with wasting money, it also wastes resources. The time and energy used in courts could have been used for other cases; the attorneys, defense counsel, juries, and law enforcement personnel could have all been involved with cases that could actually save more people’s lives; and even the courtroom itself could have been occupied by a more pressing issue.

   Choose life. It’s the right thing. As Shakespeare writes: “The quality of mercy is not strained.” Our mercy should fall like rain on all of us. Just because someone thought they should kill doesn’t mean you should think to kill them. Could you be the one who injects the lethal fluid into the veins of the strapped prisoner? Could you throw

the switch? The guilty and convicted will have such guilt may eat at them in the years. There is no reason why they should die for. Perhaps this is a more suitable punishment: to do penance.

  The land of the free means everyone has their rights and freedom and that everyone should have the bravery to do the right thing even when everything says not to.

   If you’re brave enough to stand up against corporal punishment, you could end the killing of hundreds of people in the upcoming years.

   It takes courage to sentence someone to death, but it takes even more to know that a murderer is locked up in a jail still breathing.

   Capital crimes don’t deserve capital punishment.