The death penalty should be abolished in the U.S.

The first reason I oppose the death penalty is because it is pretty ineffective at deterring crime, which makes putting it into use fairly useless. An article by the Washington Post says this, "By contrast, the question of whether executions discourage criminals from violent acts is not up to the conscience to decide. Despite extensive research on the question, criminologists have been unable to assemble a strong case that capital punishment deters crime." So what does this show, it shows that the majority of top criminologists do believe that having death penalty does not effectively deter crime. What does this mean, it means the people who research this have failed to assemble a good case that the death penalty will stop people from crimes. But there are studies that do help show that it does not deter crime. The article continues to reference a study that says this. "Fagan pointed to New York as an example. Former Gov. George Pataki (R) reinstated capital punishment in New York in 1995, and although no prisoners were executed, the law remained in place until the New York Court of Appeals struck it down in 2004. Whether or not criminals faced the threat of death seemed to have little effect on their behavior. "New York's homicide decline has continued before the capital-punishment statute, through the capital-punishment statute, and after the capital-punishment statute," Fagan said. This shows that there is an example of where the death penalty was in place at a time, and comparison to the time it was not, there was really no change, in fact crime rates actually decreased during the time it was in place. There is another example as well. "Fagan and two collaborators recently compared murder rates in Hong Kong, where capital punishment was abolished in 1993, and Singapore, where a death sentence is mandatory for murder and other crimes and is typically administered within a year and a half. The researchers found little difference between the two Asian metropolises." So in summary it really does not help deter crime, so what is the point of practicing it? I will only make one more point this round, that sometimes the wrong people are killed. Sometimes in the U.S the wrong people are convicted... and are killed for it. That's not a positive thing. Innocent people are executed for no reason, that is not exactly justice at all. Wait here is my source from before. https://www.washingtonpost.com... So the Guardian used a study conducted by legal experts and statisticians from Michigan and Pennsylvania and put out a peer reviewed study about how often people that are now proven innocent were executed in the U.S since the 1970's. The article says this, "At least 4.1% of all defendants sentenced to death in the US in the modern era are innocent, according to the first major study to attempt to calculate how often states get it wrong in their wielding of the ultimate punishment. A team of legal experts and statisticians from Michigan and Pennsylvania used the latest statistical techniques to produce a peer-reviewed estimate of the "dark figure" that lies behind the death penalty " how many of the more than 8,000 men and women who have been put on death row since the 1970s were falsely convicted." What does this show, it shows that people are being wrongly killed. To figure out approximately how many look at the number they give, the give 4.1% which we will actually round down to 4% and 8,000 people killed in the U.S about. 4% of 8,000 in 320, and we rounded down. This means that more than 320 people were wrongly convicted and executed in the U.S since the 1970's. That isn't justice that's just a bad system. If we have the death penalty in place for the purpose of deterring crime and getting justice for the families of people who were murdered yet it doesn't deter crime and people innocent of crime are being killed, then there is no justice there. If they had a long jail sentence if the evidence that pretty much proved them innocent was released and they were still alive and they could be released, when they're dead its just a bad system. So in turn the death penalty is a waste, it does not fulfill any of the purposes it is supposed to, and it has killed hundreds of random people who did not commit crimes in the last couple decades so, why is it in place. It shouldn't be. http://www.theguardian.com...