The Death Penalty: A Review
In the waning hours of September 21, 1998, it appeared that there was no hope for Anthony Porter. It seemed that all the legal avenues for a reprieve on his death sentence had been exhausted. Granted, his legal counsels throughout his attempts at a new trial or a new ruling on his present case were ill prepared at best. This, however, did not seem to cut much slack with the Illinois Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court. Both had dismissed his direct appeals and his petition for certiorari although both courts had several Justices who vehemently opposed the ruling. With fifty hours to go until his scheduled execution, it seemed to most that a stay of execution would be highly unlikely. A savior did appear, though, in the form of an I.Q. test score. In a recent test that Porter had taken, he scored an unimpressive fifty-one. A score that low gave his pro-bono attorney all the ammunition he needed and, with the help of several other volunteers, submitted a last-minute petition for a stay of execution to determine if he was mentally competent to be executed. It was at this time that a Northwestern journalism professor by the name of David Protess and some of his students became interested in the case. They did no
Many who support the death penalty would have you believe that capital punishment is a fair and necessary means of carrying out justice, but new facts and studies presented every day support the idea that the death penalty is not only an unjust but an unrealistic answer to the many issues plaguing society today. The death penalty has no place in the United States of America. The judicial system has proven itself to be inefficient at best in terms of finding and prosecuting the guilty party. " This is an extremely reckless and cold-blooded viewpoint. As a result, those who cannot afford an attorney, namely the poor, are prevented from having an adequate defense. Hart wrote, "[T]o take any life is to impose suffering not only on the criminal but also on many others. Since such extraordinary efforts are necessary to free someone from death row, one can only assume that there are more innocent men and women on death row who will not be released. People who lose a loved one to homicide are forced to deal with a major shock as well as grief for their loss. This is not an example of the judicial system at its best but at its worst. The arguments they maintain, however, are becoming less sturdy under the pressure of mounting new studies done on the unfair and ineffective nature of the death penalty. With no foreseeable end to the carelessness of the legal system and a press by the same system for a shortened appeals process, the number of wrongful convictions and executions is sure to rise. These factors make it virtually impossible for someone of low economic standing to receive a fair trial. Not only that, but they actually found the man who did commit the crimes, got him to confess on videotape, and turned it in to the police.
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Acceptance Essays
