Abolition of the Death Penalty essays

Abolition of the Death Penalty essays Resolved: that the United States Federal Government should ratify or accede to, and implement The Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights aiming at the Abolition of the Death Penalty In order to facilitate clarity and promote clash we exercise the affirmative right to define by offering the following definitions. should: is used to express moral obligation (taken from Websters New International Dictionary, second edition, 1961) Observation 2: Criteria and Resolutional Analysis A. In order for the United States to uphold its democratic ideals to the truest form possible, it must follow the basis of our democracy: the U.S. Constitution. Any law that contradicts what is in the constitution should not be allowed to exist. The death penalty is one of those laws. Rev. Jesse Jackson, Legal Lynching, Racism, Injustice, and the Death Penalty, 1996, pgs. 84 and 85. The U.S. Constitution protects the right of American citizens to their life, liberty, and property. In this, it has become the model for other countries wishing to codify human dignity, due process, and fundamental fairness in their own legal standards. The Eighth Amendment in particular the one prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment has been duplicated by new nations around the world. Germany and South Africa, two nations born from the ashes of brutal and bloody conflicts, have ruled in favor of life by banning the death penalty in their constitutions. The worldwide trend is toward the abolition of capital punishment... We recognize torture as a violation of the Eighth Amendment, but not the ultimate torture the threat of death and actual execution. Is not death by lethal injection, firing squad, or electric chair cruel and unusual punishment? Is not such punishment just as cruel as stoning or other forms of torture we call primitive? Is it not cruel to keep someone on d...