A Right To Life

Kat Bowman

SPS 206 75

Dr. Roni O’Dell

Kat Bowman

Genocide and Human Rights

3 Dec 2020

The right to life

Capital punishment or the death penalty has been around for centuries.  From the

guillotine to the electric chair it has been used to punish those who in the eyes of society have

done horrific wrongs.  It was also considered many times to be a spectacle. Before the

Guillotine was introduced, public execution took the idea of spectacle to a whole new level

“Edmund Burke had … speculated that typical European theatergoers, in the middle of a

gripping tragedy, would, upon hearing of a public execution taking place outside, immediately

abandon their tragedians to get a glimpse of the real thing,” (Smith paragraph 1). It disgusts

me that the act of state-sanctioned murder was considered entertainment. I can understand it,

considering that humans have always loved to watch violent acts such as dog-baiting and

professional wrestling or MMA fighting.  I, myself watch professional wrestling, mostly

because it is a more dangerous form of stage combat. I also find it very entertaining even

though it is mostly staged fighting, people do get hurt when they are not careful or off the

mark. There have been career ending neck injuries, concussions and back injuries.

The difference between Europe and the United States when it comes to the death

Penalty is that the United States has continuously evolved how Capital Punishment is

administered. In Europe they kept to hangings, firing squads, and for the French the guillotine

until gradually Capital Punishment was outlawed.There has been hanging and firing squads
until that seemed barbaric and was replaced by the electric Chair, which was developed by

“employees of Thomas Edison, in the context of the inventor's "war of currents" against

George Westinghouse. (Edison preferred DC to Westinghouse's AC.)” (Smith Paragraph 11).

Eventually the electric chair was replaced by lethal injection. The problem with Lethal

injection is that “state-prison officials struggling to procure effective cocktails of poison and

to find people competent enough to administer them and willing to do so.” (Smith paragraph

11).  I attribute part of the lack of finding willing trained individuals to the fact that most

doctors take the Do No Harm oath seriously.

According to an interview with Richard Dieter, lethal injections were developed in

Oklahoma due to the “problems with those older methods. There certainly were problems

with the electric chair. … the prospect of putting someone to sleep, punishing them with death

but not in a torturous or painful way, that was a way of making it easier for the public to

continue embracing executions.” (Audie Cornish). One of the problems involved with the

electric chair is similar to problems with other methods of execution, sometimes it didn’t

work the first time, also the electric chair is gruesome. It’s like being tasered but significantly

more bloody, due to voltage used and how it affects the body. By that I mean that blood,

poop, and other bodily fluids discharge as well as due to the muscles seizing up due to the

high voltage. 

Other issues with older methods of execution include that the neck doesn’t snap, and

the victim is left to be strangled to death for hanging. Strangulation is an awful way to die,

mostly due to how slow it is, with gravity being the thing to strangle you, that and your body

weight. Also there’s a reason that most people were hung with a hood on, there were often
times when blood vessels would burst and your face would do some frankly gross things, such

as bleeding and involuntary movements.  It was a lot worse than it is portrayed in the movies

and other media.  It’s not the clean, bloodless thing most people believe it to be. Most of the

movies make the criminals out to be horrible people that deserve to be punished in a

gruesome way but not all “criminals” are guilty. 

There are several reasons why Capital Punishment is a human rights violation. You

don’t have to look far into the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man to see

why Capital Punishment is a violation of that document. Article I of this document states

“Every human being has the right to life, liberty and the security of his person.” (Oas Article

I).  It’s a right no one has the power to take away, and Capital Punishment does just that, it

takes away someone’s life. People who do awful things shouldn’t just get away with what

they’ve done. Life in prison is still being alive, it’s not great but then again they did do awful

things so they shouldn’t get off scot-free.

         Not every person arrested and tried necessarily committed the crimes they were

accused of. There’s faulty science or witnesses that make up stories to help the police, or the

police themselves not following through the case. Fortunately, there are organizations that are

dedicated to freeing those who are falsely imprisoned. One Organization is the Innocence

Project. It’s one of the most well-known organizations. One case that the Innocence Project

helped to free is Clemente Aquirre-Jarquin. I will also mention that Mr. Aquirre-Jarquin is

Latino, so the system also sucks for non-white people. According to the Innocence Project

page, “On the morning of June 17, 2004, 47-year-old Cheryl Williams and 68-year-old Carol

Bareis were found stabbed to death in their home at 121 Vagabond Way in Altamonte
Springs, Florida.” (Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin paragraph 1). Mr. Aquirre-Jarquin had gone to

ask his neighbors for beer when he found them dead, attempted to save Cheryl Williams. He

made several not wise decisions because he was scared that made him look guilty and was

subsequently charged and sentenced to Death Row. In 2013, The Innocence Project helped his

defense get the DNA testing they needed to prove that he did not commit the crime. However

the motion for a new trial was denied until 2016.

It wasn’t until October of 2018 that he was acquitted. He is still fighting, however.

Florida is one of Thirty five states that compensates wrongly convicted Felons.  Mr. Aquirre-

Jarquin wrote in the Tampa Bay Times that his claim was denied “because it was supposed to

be filed 90 days after the Florida Supreme Court tossed out my conviction, even though I was

still in jail waiting to be retried at that point. I put in my claim soon after I was released, but it

was too late” (Aguirre-Jarquin paragraph 5). So the system that is supposed to help the people

it wrongly imprisons just doesn’t work sometimes because of how it’s designed. If you don’t

file or you screw up during your sentence you don’t get compensated, which doesn’t make

sense to me, because they shouldn’t have been in prison in the first place. The system was

getting a fix however but COVID hit

There was real hope things would change this year when six committees in the Florida

Legislature unanimously passed legislation to fix compensation. However, it never got

a final vote by the full House and Senate before the legislative session ended in

March.

That was a real disappointment, but I won’t give up hope that Florida lawmakers will

do the right thing. I hope they do not give up on me. Since COVID-19 hit, life has
 only gotten harder. The family and friends who were helping make ends meet now

have their own financial struggles. Without health insurance, I’m terrified that getting

sick would lead to years of debt. (Aguirre-Jarquin Paragraph 7-8)

Another point of why The Death Penalty is a human right violation I mentioned

earlier, the death isn’t painless or humane. Things can go wrong with the execution and the

victim is put through a lot of pain or suffering. The more modern ones are albeit a bit easier to

stomach than the ancient ones. Some of the methods were just straight up disturbing to think

about and the fact people watched them as entertainment is also a bit disturbing but in the past

people watch people get murdered by animals in gladiatorial combat, so I guess it’s in our

nature. Still it doesn’t make it right, there’s also the slasher movie genre for more modern

audiences to get their dose of gore. The fact of the death penalty is there hasn’t been an

improvement as for as a humane death

Lethal injection was intended to be a superior alternative to electrocution, gassing or

hanging, all of which are known to go wrong in gruesome ways. But when

pharmaceutical companies began refusing to provide their drugs for deadly use and

stories of botched injections became commonplace, the same legal qualms that had

turned courts against the earlier methods were raised about lethal injections. (Von

Drehele 29).

There is no way to always carry out the Death Penalty in a safe and humane way. It’s just the

fact of life, especially with the lethal injection. There’s so many things to account for,

especially with a person’s biology. Medication affects everyone differently so the injection is
the same. It might take longer or be more painful than it should, due to how the person’s body

reacts to the injection.

There’s also the fact that the Supreme Court is constantly dealing with death penalty

cases. That should probably say something about how Capitial Punishment is a cruel and

unsual, well maybe not unusual, punishment, due to the system it operated on for the longest

time. 

 And yet the many opinions issued since 1972 form such a tangled thicket that the late

Justice Harry Blackmun ultimately dismissed the entire enterprise as "tinker[ing] with

the machinery of death." Several other Justices have turned against the process after

leaving the court, including two of the three architects of the system, Lewis Powell

and John Paul Stevens.

Amid the confusion, one principle has remained clear: death is different. The main

reason the court abolished the old death penalty was that there were no standards for

deciding who would live or die. Even among murderers, the chance of being executed

was as random as being struck by lightning, as Justice Potter Stewart observed. The

modern death penalty was designed to guide prosecutors, judges and juries toward the

criminals most deserving of death.

Even though this system is better than the old one, it’s still flawed because there are people

who die before their sentence is carried out or who are innocent etc.

However, the death Penalty is on the decline.

 Over the past two decades, death sentences have declined precipitously as attention to

wrongful convictions has risen (Baumgartner et al., 2008). Moreover, in many of the

states that continue to issue death sentences, executions have become so rare that the

punishment is effectively a more expensive form of life without parole (LWOP)... But

the minority of inmates who are denied [LWOP] may, too, ultimately be spared, due to

both the slow pace of the appeals process and the high frequency of stays of execution.

(Caron Paragraph 1).

Honestly, the death penalty might die out, but I think it should be sooner rather than later.

Earlier this year a man was executed for being the getaway driver/ the person covering up a

murder while the murderers did not get as heavy a sentence, if any. The punishment

sometimes does not fit the crime. Historically there have been people killed for crimes they

didn’t commit due to racism, such as allegations of rape against black men where the victims

were white women.

         Another reason that the death Penalty is a human right violation has to do with the

reason some people advocate for it, to bring the families of those killed peace. According to

one of the founders of Murder Victim’s Families for Human Rights,

Arguing that an execution is the solution to the pain of victims' families does not

reflect an understanding of the journey of surviving family members after a murder,

and it completely ignores the reality of our broken capital-punishment system. Most

important, executions do not do the one thing we all really want: bring our loved ones

back from the dead. (Cushing Paragraph 6).

In that same article a victim of the Boston Marathon Bombing advocated for the death penalty

for the bomber.

And I also decided early on that the death penalty was the verdict that I wanted for

him. I believe in my heart of hearts that he knew exactly what he was doing the

moment before he did it, and possibly months before that. Among other horrific

charges, he used a weapon of mass destruction to intentionally harm and kill people. 

You can't use a weapon of mass destruction in the United States and not think that if

you succeed, you're going to face a federal jury and the possibility of the death

penalty.

It must have been nice for him to be surrounded by a courtroom full of people fighting

about whether he should live or die. None of us in Boston that day had such a luxury.

(Adrianne Haslet-Davis Paragraph 3-6)

Now I believe that this opinion comes from a place of anger and the fear that she undoubtedly

felt that day. She mentions earlier that she thought she was going to die that day, so I

understand wanting the person who caused that to pay, but is state-santioned murder really the

answer. He dies and that experience isn’t erased and catharsis is rarely reached. There’s just

one more person dead and would that be the deterrent we hope for or would certain groups see

the mastermind as a martyr. Capital Punishment isn’t a deterrant for regular crime so why

would people think it would be for terrorism. There is no proof that Capital punishment is a

deterrant and most inmates end up dying before they’re executed to due the time it takes for

appeals to be exhausted.
 The Boston Marathon bombing changed things for a lot of states. In 2015, an Article

was published in TIME Magazine about the change in the death penalty after and around the

time of this case

On May 27, the conservative Nebraska state legislature abolished the death penalty in

that state despite a veto attempt by Governor Pete Ricketts. A parallel bill passed the

Delaware state senate in March and picked up the endorsement of Governor Jack

Markell, formerly a supporter of the ultimate sanction. Only a single vote in a House

committee kept the bill bottled up, and supporters vowed to keep pressing the issue.

(Von Drehele 28)

Nebraska wasn’t the only state to change it’s tune about the death penalty.

In February, Markell's neighboring governor, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, declared an

open-ended moratorium on executions. That officially idles the fifth largest death row

in America. The largest, in California, is also at a standstill while a federal appeals

court weighs the question of whether long delays and infrequent executions render the

penalty unconstitutional. (Von Drehele 28).

Even the more “trigger happy” so to speak states are starting to get wise.

Even in Texas, which leads the nation in executions since 1976 (when the U.S.

Supreme Court approved the practice after a brief moratorium), the wheels are coming

off the bandwagon. From a peak of 40 executions in 2000, the Lone Star State put 10

prisoners to death last year and seven so far in 2015. According to the state's

department of corrections, the number of new death sentences imposed by Texas

 courts this year is precisely zero. There, as elsewhere, prosecutors, judges and jurors

are concluding that the modern death penalty is a failed experiment. (Von Drehele 28).

The system of state-sanctioned murder is not working and never really has. It’s faulty and the

lack of funding to actually go through with the executions could be considered cruel and

unusual Punishment, due to the amount of time it now takes for the states to have the money

to afford the executions.

The Death penalty is inhumane and unjust. There is no way to always sentence the

correct person. The methods don’t always give the quick and painless death that people who

are for the death penalty claim. It’s not right and the people who would be sentenced to death

should get life in prison. There was a study done in 2007, which included a phone survey of

600 white persons and 600 black persons. The study in question was created to see if there

was a racial divide with who opposed capital punishment. The question had a four point scale

(strongly or somewhat by Favored and opposed) and contained neutral language.

The racial frame condition presented respondents with a statement claiming, “Some

people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are

executed are African-Americans” before asking about the respondent’s support for the

death penalty. The experiment also included an innocence frame in which respondents

heard the statement “Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because too

many innocent people are being executed” prior to being asked about their support for

capital punishment. (Ryden Butler, Brendan Nyhan paragraph 6).

The study became the base for a newer study in 2016. This study was to determine if there

was any “white backlash” and two rounds were done. The results of the first round
determined that there was “no evidence of white backlash in our replication and extension of

[the original study]” (Ryden Butler, Brendan Nyhan paragraph 12). This study shows that

people’s opinion on the death penalty is not necessarily banking on the fact that the system is

skewed toward minorities but that The Death Penalty is just wrong in general. It violations the

right to life and people who do bad things should spend the rest of their lives imprisoned for

the horrible thing or things that they did.

 Bibliography

Aguirre-Jarquin, Clemente. “I Was Wrongfully Convicted, but the State Won’t Pay Me What I’m

Owed | Column.” Tampa Bay Times, 29 May 2020,

www.tampabay.com/opinion/2020/05/29/i-was-wrongfully-convicted-but-the-state-wont-pay-

me-what-im-owed-column/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2020. 

Audie Cornish. “The Grim History Of The Modern Death Penalty.” All Things Considered (NPR),

May 2014. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=n5h&AN=6XN201405022007&site=ehost-live.

Caron, Christian. “Public Opinion and Death Penalty Policy Under Direct Democracy Institutions: A

Longitudinal Analysis of the American States - Christian Caron, 2020.” SAGE Journals, 30

July 2020, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1532673X20943560. 

“Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin.” Innocence Project, 12 Feb. 2020, innocenceproject.org/cases/clemente-

aguirre-jarquin/. 

Cushing, Renny, and Adrianne Haslet-Davis. “Should the Death Penalty Live?” TIME Magazine,

vol. 185, no. 21, June 2015, pp. 30–31. EBSCOhost, setonhill.idm.oclc.org/login?

url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=afh&AN=102909400&site=ehost-live.

Oas. Organization of American States: Democracy for Peace, Security, and Development. 1 Aug.

2009, www.oas.org/en/iachr/mandate/Basics/declaration.asp. 
Ryden Butler, Brendan Nyhan. “Revisiting White Backlash: Does Race Affect Death Penalty

Opinion? - Ryden Butler, Brendan Nyhan, Jacob M. Montgomery, Michelle Torres, 2018.”

SAGE Journals, 18 Jan. 2018, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053168017751250. 

SMITH, JUSTIN E. H. “‘There Is Blood, a Lot of Blood, Very Red Blood.’” Chronicle of Higher

Education, vol. 61, no. 42, 7 Aug. 2015, pp. B14–B17. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&AN=108803624&site=ehost-live.

“Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” United Nations, United Nations,

www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. 

Von Drehle, David. “Bungled Executions. Backlogged Courts. And Three More Reasons the Modern

Death Penalty Is A Failed Experiment. (Cover Story).” TIME Magazine, vol. 185, no. 21,

June 2015, pp. 26–33. EBSCOhost, setonhill.idm.oclc.org/login?

url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=afh&AN=102909399&site=ehost-live.