Argumentive/Capital Punishment

 
 
Ayana White
English 162
Is There Morality in The Death Penalty?
 
One day a fifteen-year old Paula Cooper and several of her teenage friends from Gary, Indiana, robbed and murdered seventy-eight year old Bible teacher Ruth Pelke.  The girls plotted the robbery in order to get money for video games.  They led Mrs. Pelke to believe that they wanted to take bible lessons and she allowed them entry into her home.  Paula Cooper had brought along a butcher knife and stabbed the unexpected Mrs. Pelke thirty three times.
 
This crime reached beyond its community’s outrage to the hearts of many Americans.  Despite Paula’s tragic childhood and abusive family she became the youngest woman to be sentenced to death.  Paula spent the rest of her teenage years and her early adulthood on death row.  Her attorney appealed her case, but she lost the appeal and was eventually executed.  During Paula’s time on death row she acquired a vast amount of supporters that petitioned to have her pardoned.  Opponents of the death penalty were particularly outraged because Paula was legally under age at the time she committed the crime, they felt she deserved another chance at life.  Mrs. Pelke’s own grandson even spoke on Paula’s behalf.  He believed it would be just wrong for the state to kill Paula as it had been for her to kill his grandmother.  This case like most death penalty became a complex controversy.  Over the years Paula spent in the Indiana Women’s Prison was she still a dangerous criminal?  Should she have been given a chance to find out? Or should she have received a life sentence?  Or is death the only appropriate penalty for murder.
 
Most societies at some time or another have endorsed the death penalty: in fact before there were prisons there was the death penalty.  Legal execution has shared our human culture from the very beginning.  “One of the first written codes of law, composed by Hammaurabi of Babylonia and carved on a stone column nearly four thousand...