No Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and US Constitution, it is clear stated that cruel and unusual punishment should be prohibited. It means that the government has no right to impose prisoners with cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment regardless of the degree of severity of their crimes. To treat death row prisoners with nonconsensual medical experiment, with unknown potential harm and risk to them, is such a cruel and inhuman punishment without applying any legal process to justify this action. It's absolutely degrading as the prisoners are treated as animals or mere objects without consent, basically a convenient human guinea pig. Any civilized society should not allow this cruel punishment happen because it goes against the fundemental basis of that society, which is the respect and protection of liberty, rights and freedom as a citizen. All across the world or even history there's rules against cruel and unusual punishment. As early as it written in Bill of Rights by King Williams III and Queen Mary II in 1687, and as wide as it adopted in article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of UN General Assembly in 1948. Similar articles appear in European Convention of Human rights in 1950 and Charter of the Fundemental Human Rights of EU in 2000. Besides, US is one of the 148 countries signed and ratified the UN Convention Against Torture which was passed by 1984. The Eighth Amendment of US Constitution also stated that there should be no cruel or unusual punishment. Propositon's model is a serious violation of the baise value of justice universally acknowledged by international conventions and US own constitution and Bill of Rights. The botton line of justice for a civilized society is that we do not allow any forms of cruel and unusual punishment. To treat death convicts as objects of experiment WITHOUT their consent across this line and should not be uphold as means to real justice, for however noble ends the proposition sides claims. A vaccine should be developed and acquired under legal experiments with the consent of volunteers. Save life should not be based through tramping life and the legal rights such a life possess. This will degrade the meaning and spirit of real liberty, justice and human rights the US government is based upon. It would be a big mock of the democratic system US founding fathers tried so hard to establish 233 ago. Somehow the US has a reputation for the way they treat their prisoners. We can see from the example of Guantanamo Bay how degrading and hypercritical it is for cruel and unusual punishment or torture to exist in a democratic society, and how much condemination and criticism it received accross the world. The proposition's plan will only deteriorate the situation and further damage the international image of US as the biggest Western democracy, let alone to say how much wrong it is to use cruel punishment to those prisoner. Obama already pledged to close the Guantanamo to correct this fundemental flaw in the justice system, we have no reason to believe that the US Department of Health and Human Services could act beyond the same reasons the president upholds to allow and even supervise the use of rightless human guinea pigs. Yes the opposition probably would cry, not for proposition's thoughs but for the fall of justice and civilized society their thoughts will lead to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruel_and_unusual_punishment