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“It’s Time to Abolish the Death Penalty”

Americans are starting to argue about if the death penalty at prisons is just or unjust. Some people believe that “killers deserve to be killed” or other things like that but a Huffington Post writer named Sean McElwee believes the opposite. McElwee believes that the death penalty needs to be abolished.

McElwee states his own explicit position of the death penalty being abolished. He brings up the fact that one of the many countries that has abolished the death penalty is Germany and that their reason was because the crimes of Nazism and how the idea or the state putting people death is too much to countenance. Germany would not reinstate the death penalty because there would be an unjust sentence of there being Jewish and Germans and who gets the death penalty, there would be a widespread accusation of racial preference if the Jewish people got a death sentence and a German did not when they commit the same crime, he says “And yet, without fail, this is the case with America’s criminal justice system.” McElwee states that the problem matters because the death penalty is costly, ineffective, archaic and most importantly unjust. He does not only bring the point that it is bad but he does say that “I used to argue, when defending the death penalty , that if someone could show me a single instance of an innocent man being executed, I would concede. I knew that this would be tough. After all, most murder investigations end when the accused is killed by the state. But there is ample evidence that we have already killed an innocent man.” He has good reasons and also good evidence of his position of abolishing the death penalty. His reasons are that race is part of the problem of who gets the death penalty and who does not, there are instances of false incrimination, and that the death penalty undermines the very purpose of our criminal justice system.