I write this letter in response to an essay concerning capital punishment, which I recently read on the website wowessays.com. In the essay, Patricia A. Stegall argues a position in support of the death penalty. She claims that conviction of certain crimes requires a mandatory death sentence. The author states that crimes of murder and rape mandate a punishment of death for the offender. As a relative of a boy who has committed such a crime, I can personally relate to the thousands of citizens who disagree with Stegall's reasoning. I disagree with the author's pro capital punishment position because taking the life of an individual is an irreversible and everlasting punishment; man-made laws do not have the right to determine when and where an individual's life will end.
             While some of the author's points are based on ideas that I agree with, the majority of her statements in support of the death penalty are irrelevant and do not add any validity to her argument. Stegall states that it is "inappropriate to make excuses..." for criminals who come from a childhood of abuse. How can anyone believe that the events of a man's childhood have no effect on the rest of his life? I can see why some people take issue with the concept of paying money for others to spend a life time in jail. "Long prison terms mean large and costly institutions that must sooner or later, be paid for by all of us." I agree that society should not be obligated to pay for the mistakes of other out of their own pocket. In an attempt to prove that the system works, the author provides a statistic that of the 7000 executions over a period of eighty five years; only 25 innocent people were put to death. It seems to me that Stegall is saying that it is justifiable to make a few mistakes with concern to the lives of innocent human beings, in order to be sure that the guilty parties are convicted. "The execut...