The death penalty is a common punishment for those who society deems condemnable, despite that being the case, it should be banned for all individuals. The American Judicial System is far from perfect; therefore, punishments may be flawed as well. “The death penalty carries the inherent risk of executing an innocent person. Since 1973, at least 200 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated (2023).” If the system cannot get a true conviction one hundred percent of the time, then there should not be a punishment that is irreversible.

It is common knowledge that the values of the criminal justice system are punishment and rehabilitation. Convicts are not expected to rehabilitate themselves if they are dead, therefore the concept is undermined. Beyond that, the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. The issue with Capital Punishment is that it is not seen out by medical professions because they vow to do no harm. “Doctors hold their medical knowledge in trust for the collective wellbeing of mankind, and they must guard against the exploitation of that knowledge in ways that compromise the supreme aspirations of the profession (Bonnie, 1992).” Medical professionals would be undermining the values of the medical field because they are doing harm by following through with and execution. Thus, there is no humane way to execute a criminal, even with a hypothetical medical doctor assisting with procedures, it is a paradoxical request. 

Capital Punishment needs to be banned for so many reasons, but “The death penalty is retributive for murderers (among possible other crimes); it potentially deters the commission of future murders (even though the statistics on this are notoriously hard to prove, no one has shown conclusively that the death penalty cannot, or even that it does not, deter) (Mbah, Pruitt & Wasum, 2019)”. Justice and retribution are not the same; punishment is the part where they are taken away from society and the removal of normalcy from their lives. Death for a crime is not an adequate punishment because there is no opportunity for death row inmates to redeem themselves. Yet, if inmates redeem themselves before they are scheduled to be put to death, then the system is working and there would be no reason for such a grim punishment. 

The American Judicial System needs to do better, and by signing this petition, murder can be avoided. There will be no justice for victims if we cannot even get the convictions right, and there will be injustice for death row inmates if we proceed in taking their lives at a whim of a judge and prosecutor. Anyone can be falsely convicted of anything and go to death row. No one expects anything bad to happen to them until it does, and by then it is too late. If you sign the petition, you may secure the future for many people. One of those people could be you, your spouse, your child, or any loved one. History has repeated itself repeatedly, but it needs to stop now.

Go to, https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ to contact the President or Vice President to ban the Death Penalty.