Senior paper part 2 draft

Claim—United States crime rates would drop substantially if we reverted from the use of lethal injection as capital punishment to the form used in medieval times.

Imagine you steal a television from a local electronics store. The police arrest you and find you have some prior and are going to go to prison the judge who tries your case sends you to 5 years in prison. In past times such a crime could have gotten you far worse; the rack, whipped, the thumb crusher, and far worse. Now imagine a person you know kills another and is sent to death row. They spend 5 years sitting in a cell then are executed by method of lethal injection. In past times the person’s sentence would have been much more sever and dealt with promptly. Weather it was the pear in the mouth, the chair, or any other methods you can guarantee it would be drawn out, painful, and lead to either death or infection leading to death no matter what. Which would you like more? Lethal injection or medieval torture? I hope you chose lethal injection. However if you saw in the news not of criminals dying of lethal injection or the electric chair; but of the death by the pear of anguish, racks, stocks , or other methods would you be likely to ever commit that kind of crime? I know I wouldn’t. Even with stealing if you got whipped or placed in the stocks for a week you would not steal but the punishment of jail time, fines, and community service we receive and see now does nothing to cause us not to steal. I believe the crime rates in the United States would drop substantially if we reverted from the means of capital punishment we use today to the forms of medieval torture once used.

In our world today we have different methods of capital punishment from the Hammurabi codes practiced in many of the Saudi Arabian countries where if you steal your hand is cut off, if again you are caught stealing the other is cut off, at the third time the person in beheaded. In Columbia a person caught drunk driving over there limit is shot on the side of the road. There is no trail, no questions, the family is notified of where the car is located so they may retrieve it before they are fined for it being left on the side of the road. Here in America criminals over the last 70 years have waited on death row looking toward their execution by the gas chambers now deemed dangerous because of sealing the chamber so its safe for witnesses and the operators; or by hanging which is still an option but not used because of blotched executions and accidental decapitations. Some even looked on to the firing squad though it is no longer used for the guard that we’re on the squads well being. We now use the electric chair in some states though many have ruled it cruel after blotched executions, Lethal injection is now the method primarily used in the United States with some giving the option for the person to choose. Lethal injection practiced in 37 states is the most widely used method however though claimed as humane it too has its flaws. Many who have the pleasure of this method are past drug users with veins that seem impossible to find and are many times so tight that as the chemical cocktail is administered they expand past their point and explode causing many times chemical burns, sever pain, and cause to have to move the IV and try again.

- Why

- flaws in ways now

- static’s

Medieval torture

Rape, Criminal assault, Kidnapping, Robbery/rape/kidnapping, Espionage, Burglary, Arson, Treason, Theft, Counterfeiting, Sodomy/buggery/bestiality

- methods

- reasons

- flaws

Why we should revert

- why its better to use

- improvements

- static comparisons

- how it would improve

- constitution

Proposal

- what would change

- what would stay the same

- how you make it work

Conclusion

- tying it all together

- final why