Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, 802 people have been executed nationwide (DPIC). Among those executed have been minors, the mentally retarded, and the innocent. Capital punishment is fallible, irrevocable, expensive, and filled with racial and class bias. The death penalty violates our most basic human rights, and I strongly believe it should be abolished.
             "An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."- Albert Camus (1957)
             It is written in the United States Bill of Rights that punishment for a crime cannot be "cruel and unusual" (Rein, 4). However, the death penalty is an act of unutterable cruelty where the prisoner is informed of the exact date of his/her death and is tortured by thoughts of their impending execution. Sister Helen Prejean, a death row counselor in Louisiana, said that everyone she has met on death row has had the same terrifying dream of being dragged out of their cells kicking and screaming to the execution chamber (Williams, 65). She stated, "Human beings condemned to death anticipate death, have imaginations, and die a thousand times before they die". There are also several examples of painful deaths by execution. For instance, in 1997 while being electrocuted in Florida, Pedro Medina's head ca...