eighth amendment at its worst
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The Eighth Amendment at its Worst
The idea and application of Cruel and Unusual punishment has long been in debate. Some see it as only a reference to "unnecessary" torture, where others infer its definition to mean that the punishment is too excessive for the crime. Many people in the latter category apply their specific inference to the death penalty: a punishment that, as a standard, is too excessive for the crime. In this day and age, the eighth amendment of the United States Constitution, which prohibits the practice of cruel and unusual punishment, has not been properly applied; people are being killed in the name of the federal government.
First of all, the death penalty is cruel and unusual in that it uses the death of a human being, inflicted by the government, to encourage and ratify the idea of revenge in our society as a whole. The problem is, sentencing inmates to death has not lowered the amounts of murders and such in our nation, so what does this do for the society? It is simply a primitive appeasement of the ones who were emotionally hurt by the defendant's possible crime, an appeasement that takes away the life of a human being.
Secondly, there is the impending possibility that the defendant, who was or is about to be killed, is actually innocent of the alleged crime. If this is the case, which it has been many times before, the government has then punished someone with an irreversible sentence DEATH. The innocent, in this case, have surely endured a pure case of cruel and unusual punishment...