C righttopChapter 11
Sentencing/Capital Punishment
76500Chapter 11
Sentencing/Capital Punishment
2200017094203000030175207060056600rightbottomColorado Technical UniversityIntro to Criminal Justice
765000Colorado Technical UniversityIntro to Criminal Justice

Abstract
The Death Penalty has been a big debatable topic for as long as my memory serves me. It’s been a very controversial topic in still in the world today. As of 2014, there are 38 states in the United States that currently support Capital Punishment. Is the Death Penalty right? Is the Death Penalty wrong? There are many different sources that support the Death Penalty, such as the Government, and the Military. If capital punishment was done in a more expeditious way, it could stir fear into people from committing those crimes that got them there in the first place. If it was carried out more and more than it is now, it could prevent crime in the future. The costs of Capital Punishment is a big reason why there is an opposition in this matter. We’re going to dive in and research this very important topic and see what we can dig up.
We’re going to start by talking about the pros and cons of the death penalty or as some would know it as capital punishment. What is capital punishment anyways? Different people have different understandings of what capital punishment actually is. Asking around my neighborhood people would come up with different definitions of what capital punishment, some didn’t even know what it was. Some examples range from “justice”, “I don’t know”, “revenge” etc. In the book Criminal Justice Today capital punishment is defined “the death penalty”. It goes on to say “it is the most extreme of all sentencing options”. We can get more graphic than the book states such as death is the only way out of jail. I just thought of that and it gave me chills. There are a few people we are going to research a little later on. First we are going to research what capital punishment or the death penalty is.
To receive the death penalty a person has to do something so unhuman, he/she has to do something so unbelievably evil that there is no excuse not to end their life for what they did the these certain individuals. Now the death penalty back in the day, you could do just about anything when it came to the death penalty. As a history major, I had to study different ways of punishment. Some of the early stages of capital punishment ranged from getting buried up to their necks in sand where either fire ants or camel spiders would eat the flesh off of the face of the person sentenced to die until that person was bone. There was some of the more graphic execution, say there was a person that had murdered and raped a girl, the person would be sentenced to die by tying a piece of rope to the end of the penis and the other to a horse and literally severed the penis off until he bled to death.
In today’s age, you’ll see the same murders and rapes and murders, but the thing that changes from back then today is the way that the executions happen. These executions have evolved from the ways mentioned above. From hanging people to stoning people, putting people in the gas chamber, firing squad, the list goes on and on. Currently the past decade or so you will see that there are more and more mass murders going on. There is a question going around is “of all the people that are doing the mass murders lately, would they all be getting the death penalty? In my opinion the answer should be and would be yes. In the sentencing part of the book there is a section called Death: The Ultimate Sanction, talked about Ray Underwood, who murdered a 10 year old neighbor when he was younger. Was this crime bad enough to be put to death? I don’t believe so, I believe that this crime could have been jail time no death is necessary. Yes there are any people that oppose capital punishment, and there are those that support capital punishment. There was a time in 2005 when Stanley