On August 16th, 1936, a man and his wife came home to the sounds of their two daughters (Barbara and Dorothy) in agony in the upstairs bedroom. The couple rushed to their daughters’ aid only to discover that while they had been away for the night one of their daughters had been brutally raped and murdered with an axe while the other had been badly injured. Barbara had miraculously survived the injuries, but they had lost Dorothy. Police arrested a prime suspect days later when they found the man wandering the rail roads.
Joe Arridy brought in by the Wyoming sheriff’s department days after the brutal murder. Arridy was a 23-year-old, mentally disabled man that had an IQ of just 46 and who behaved and thought more like a child than an adult. He was unable to count to five or tell the difference between the colors red and blue. Arridy was led into by the towns sheriff in what was said to be a plot to regain his fame. After his conviction, police had been investigating another prime suspect in the murder, Frank Augilar, who had actually been found with the murder weapon in his home. Augilar convinced the police that Arridy had actually been the one who killed the man and that he was only an accomplice, resulting in both men being sentenced to death by gas chamber. On January 6th, 1939 Arridy was escorted to the gas chamber while holding his red toy train yelling “A wreck! A wreck! Fix the wreck!” as he played with his toy train for the last time. Arridy was unable to comprehend he was about be put to death, as when the warden explained what was going on Joe replied saying “No, no, Joe won’t die”. He then stepped into the gas chamber smiling widely as he was strapped to chair, blindfolded and then robbed of his life.
The first known death penalty historically recorded, was back in the 16th century BC in Egypt. There was a man who was accused of using magic and was ordered to take his own life. The non-nobility people of Egypt were to be executed by axe. There were many cases before this time where evidence had been found promoting the death penalty. These included the 14th century Hittite Code, 7th century Draconinan Code of Athens and the 5th century Roman Law of the Twelve Tables. So as far as we as a planet have known, execution has always been an option for ridding of the wrongdoers in our society, which is a morbid thought.
Since 1976 there have been a total 1,483 executions by the death penalty in the United States, with 23 of them being in 2017 and already 18 in 2018. There were more than 993 executions conducted in 2016, with more than thousands being executed in China (numbers remain confidential by the country). These numbers are absolutely mind-blowing considering we hear about only one or two of these cases through the media. The death penalty includes execution by electrocution, firing squad, gas chamber, hanging and lethal injection. In the past eight years there have 295 total executions by using electrocution, firing squad and most often used lethal injection, ages ranging from 22-83. With that being said they have ruled out execution by gas chamber in the last ten years and by hanging for a while before that. But yet we still remain to kill our own people by execution. By the end of 2017, 106 countries have completely abolished the death penalty.
Studies show that murder does not decrease in areas with the death penalty. The South accounts for over 80 percent of the executions commenced in the United States since 1976, while continuing on having the highest murder rates. This raises the thought that if having the death penalty isn’t effective in stopping crime, why do we continue to endorse this method? Human activist groups have been fighting the death penalty fiercely this past decade as it is a method that goes against human rights and conflicts with the eight amendment of the constitution. The death penalty was ruled by congress to not be in violation of the eighth amendment, as they don’t consider it to be cruel and unusual punishment. While both of those things are extremely debatable, I disagree and think that it is a cruel punishment, depending on how the victim of the death penalty feels about death. Even though congress has ruled the death penalty to not be in any violation of our country’s constitution, there still are “guidelines” shaped out to follow as to when and how the execution may be carried out. This is why we no longer hang as a form of the death penalty as the constitution states this as not being one of the “evolving standards of decency” that we accept in our country. But not more than a decade ago there was an execution by firing squad, which is when an inmate is placed in a wooden chair in the center of a room, with a literal target pinned to the chest over the inmate’s heart. The inmate is then given up to two minutes to relay their last words. The five shooters that are in another room with their rifles sticking through the wall, then shoot the inmate to death. This is a direct violation of the eighth amendment, as nobody should die this way. Given that this way of execution is not illegal in all of our country, it is still used in a lot of countries around the world. In a way it is ironic how our government thinks that endorsing murder will prevent more murder from happening.
“The death penalty is a symptom of a culture of violence, not a solution to it”. This is a quote by Amnesty International, a human rights activist group that rally’s around the world for basic human rights. This quote is particularly interesting especially considering how the South does the most executions while also having the highest murder rate of the states that condone the death penalty. Does our country still having the death penalty, somehow connect with our culture in our country today? That’s a tough question to answer. No, we don’t encourage murder in this country or any kind of crime to be exact. But our government providing the resources for our justice systems to execute someone, could be taken quite controversially. I believe that we are headed in the right direction as a country when it comes the death penalty, as we have banned most of the ways to execute inmates. Our numbers of executions have gone down substantially from 1976, which a majority of our population wouldn’t recognize because of the lack of publicity that our country gives to these executions happening. That might be the problem with why our country is still doing this. I was certainly shocked when I read about the amount of people that are being put on the death penalty and the ways they do it. I have only briefly heard a couple times in my whole life about someone being “lethally injected” but I don’t think I fully comprehended what that meant until I read into it more and understood the process that was involved and the amount of people that were killed this way. There is actually a list of all people executed since 1976, and all of the people scheduled to be executed up until 2021.
We should punish those who commit crimes whatever severity that may be. We should have a justice system that is fair and punishes those according to the crimes they commit and the frequency they commit crimes. But ending a life that is no more and no less precious than our own is a horrid way for one’s life to end and a horrid way for one to end someone’s life. I sympathize for those who have loved ones that were affected by the doers of these crimes and do want them to get justice. This situation isn’t about whether a criminal gets what they deserve, but an act of one human being to another. I don’t believe that we should end someone’s life in that process. If we continue in the direction that we have been going in these past couple decades, I believe that we will have ended the death penalty in our country within the next ten years if we recognize what the media fails to show us. We will have ended an era that began as long as historical records go. We could be among the hundreds of other countries, some of which are less developed than our own, that have abolished the death penalty and execution in their land.