The Don Quixote Society Website is beginning a new series on criminal justice issues, including an examination of criminal prosecutor misconduct, including instances of bribing informant witnesses with plea bargains, abuse of the grand jury system, and exploitation of crime victims. We consider cases of police brutality including evidence tampering, perjury, torture, and murder. Broad topics of judicial reform, abolution of the death penalty, gun control, and others will be added in time.
To set the tone of the series we begin with the following statement by Amnesty International of the United Kingdom on why they oppose the death penalty.
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty because it is a violation of two fundamental human rights, as laid down in Articles 3 and 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the right to life and the right not to be tortured or subject to any cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment. An execution, like physical forms of torture, involves a deliberate assault on a prisoner. The only difference is that the assault is continued until a person is killed.
Even so-called "humane" methods like lethal injections lead to difficulties. Medical professionals around the world are prohibited from participating in executions, so needles and intravenous lines are inserted into prisoners by unqualified staff. Where there have been problems finding a suitable vein, orderlies have performed crude "cut-downs" into a prisoner's arm. Tubing has been known to spring leaks and spray the executioner with the poisons. The application of electric current and cyanide gas, tightening a rope around or dropping a blade upon the neck are not designed to be pain-free. Nor is death automatically instantaneous. Each method has caused its share of botched executions, where the prisoner dies in protracted agony. In the USA, lethal injections have resulted in more botched executions than any other method in recent years.
The death penalty has no place in a modern criminal justice system. The death penalty is not an effective deterrent. Because all judicial systems make mistakes and because of its irrevocable nature, the death penalty kills innocent individuals who are wrongly convicted. The death penalty brutalises society and breeds contempt for human life.
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