Capital Punishment Essay: Its Fair and Effective -- Argumentative Pe

Capital Punishment - It's Fair and Effective   Ã‚  Ã‚   Confronting head-on two of the most prominent objections to the death penalty is the object of this paper: Is the death penalty a miscarriage of justice? And Does it Deter Crime?    It's a miscarraige of justice. In a survey Professors Hugo Adam Bedau and Michael Radelet found that 7000 persons were executed in the United States between 1900 and 1985 and that 35 were innocent of capital crimes (1). Among the innocents they list Sacco and Vanzetti as well as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Although their data may be questionable, I do not doubt that, over a long enough period, miscarriages of justice will occur even in capital cases. Despite precautions, nearly all human activities, such as trucking, lighting, or construction, cost the lives of some innocent bystanders. We do not give up these activities, because the advantages, moral or material, outweigh the unintended losses (2). Analogously, for those who think the death penalty just, miscarriages of justice are offset by the moral benefits and the usefulness of doing justice. For those who think death penalty unjust even when it does not miscarry, miscarriages can hardly be decisive.    Is it a deterrent? Despite much recent work, there has been no conclusive statistical demonstration that the death penalty is a better deterrent than are alternative punishments (3). However, deterrence is less than decisive for either side. Most abolitionists acknowledge that they would continue to favor abolition even if the death penalty were shown to deter more murders than alternatives could deter (4). Abolitionists appear to value the life of a convicted murderer or, at least, his non-execution, more highly than they v... ...n, however just, of murderers. But although there is a lively discussion of the subject, not serious evidence exists to support the hypothesis that executions produce a higher murder rate. Cf. Phllips, the deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: New Evidence on an Old Controversy, 86 Am. J. Soc. 139 (1980) (arguing that murder rates drop immediately after executions of criminals). 6 H. Gross, A Theory of Criminal Justice 489 (1979) (attributing this passage to Sir James Fitzjames Stephen). 7 Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349 (1910) suggest that penalties be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime - a common theme in criminal law. Murder, therefore, demands more that life imprisonment. In modern times, our sensibility requires that the range of punishments be narrower than the range of crime - but not so narrow as to exclude the death penalty.   

Composing an Impartial Jury & Balancing Multi-Racial Representations Essay

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees the right to trial by jury in state court. This amendment makes the 6th and 7th amendments applicable to the states. The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution grants a criminal defendant the right to a trial â€Å"by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed. † The Seventh Amendment provides a similar right in civil cases. The United States Supreme Court has defined, an â€Å"impartial† jury as a jury drawn from a representative cross-section of the community in the district or division where the court convenes. The framers of the constitution sought to create an independent judiciary and to protect the people against arbitrary action by that judiciary. The right to be tried by a jury of his or her peers safeguards a person accused of a crime against a corrupt or overzealous prosecutor and against a compliant, biased, or eccentric judge. The requirement of a jury chosen from a fair cross-section of the community is fundamental to the American system of justice; it plays a pivotal role in ensuring impartiality. The first step in the process consists of the creation and maintenance of a master list from which the jury pool is drawn. This can include source lists such as voter registration, driver’s license, state income tax files, unemployment records, and public assistance rosters. The second step is the selection of the actual trial jury from the pool of citizens. Lastly is the instillation of the trial jury as a non-biased and fair representation of the defendant’s peers. Notwithstanding the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of the right to an impartial jury, there are inherent flaws in the jury selection process. It is the second step that is most likely to be the downfall of the third. Randomly selected pools of potential jury members do not always accurately represent the entire community. These randomly selected pools often under represent both racial and ethnic minorities. The American Bar Association works to promote justice, professional excellence, and respect for the law. In doing so it has a natural stake in the selection of fair jury pools. The ABA is the largest voluntary professional association in the world. They provide many important resources including programs to assist lawyers and judges in their work, and initiatives to improve the legal system for the public. In line with their standards for the ethical practices of jury trials, the ABA has established two goals in regards to the juror master lists. The first is inclusion of all eligible citizens. The second is representation of all portions of the community, These goals often prove difficult to accomplish in practice. This paper will focus on three aspects of a process, which together constitute the definition, selection, and empanelment of a fair and impartial jury. Lastly it will summarize these points and then suggest a model to aide in overcoming the shortfalls evident in the current systems. Part I lays the foundation for what constitutes an impartial jury. Part II identifies general racial stereotypes jurors may hold about defendants and address the importance of combating those stereotypes to insure impartiality. Part III highlights the key players in the empanelment of an impartial jury and the need for collaboration among them during the voir dire process. The report will also discuss placing limits on the voir dire process, including the possibility of eliminating it all together. Part IV, the summary, proposes a two-point model that strives for both fairness and consistency. The intent is to preserve the role of the adversary system in jury selection. This should strengthen the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of an impartial jury. I. DEFINING AN IMPARTIAL JURY The Sixth Amendment’s reference to an â€Å"impartial jury† has served as the basis for the broadly accepted definition of a jury composed of the defendant’s peers. Additionally, an impartial jury is one that will decide the case on the evidence and law given to them by the judge. This must occur even if they personally disagree with the law. The process should be free from the bias of either prosecution or defense, and the jury members should represent the class, race, and gender scheme of the community where the defendant resides. Racial diversity within a jury has been a favored method in which to bring about impartiality and the idea of procedural fairness. This understanding is based upon the statement that â€Å"diversity on the jury enhances its ability to consider a variety of perspectives in evaluating the evidence at trial, that ability is reduced when juries fail to reflect the diversity in the community from which they are drawn. † Although an adversarial process is an essential part of our legal system, the goal of empanelling an impartial jury may require more collaboration and less competition at the voir dire stage. A jury derived from a source that excludes certain people based on race is non-representative and thus unconstitutional. Racial, ethnic or other stereotypes can lead to bias and a lack of impartiality among the jury members. There have been several models used over the years to create a jury panel that accurately represents the community and offers impartial fairness. The Blank Slate model and the Merger model are amongst them. The â€Å"Blank Slate† model assumes that all potential jurors arrive in court with no knowledge of the case, prior expectations, preconceived notions, or particular dispositions. The court instructed potential jurists to set aside all personal experience on entering the courthouse. However, courts and other social scholars soon realized that it was not only impossible, but also unproductive to use jurors with no opinions available to them, aside from those presented in the court. It was recognized that â€Å"jurors come to the courthouse with a variety of beliefs and experiences, but assumes that each juror who is selected to decide the case will put aside any biases, group allegiances, or predispositions in order to decide a case impartially. † This model was also contrary to the selection of a cross-section of the community, lacking both diversity and cultural identifications. The United States Supreme Court observed, â€Å"Impartiality is a group, rather than an individual, characteristic. † This stance led to their approval of the Merger Model over the Blank Slate Model. The Merger Model focuses on the requirement that the pool of jurors itself needs to be a cross section of the community. It attempts to balance the need for everyday experience with the desirability of a blank slate with regard to the facts of the case. This model recognizes that while individual jurors may not be able to be impartial, the exchange of viewpoints and opposing opinions in the jury room will result in an impartial jury. This balancing factor recognizes and respects the differences in jurist opinions, which stem from uncommon life experience, but allows impartial compositions based on the checks and balances of a group system. Much as the ABA discovered concerning their stated goals, the model encouraged by the Supreme Court is more difficult to defend in practice than it is on paper. Opponents of the model argue that the courts can not achieve the selections of a representative cross section of the community. â€Å"A small sample of twelve or a few, even one that is randomly drawn, and particularly one that is molded by excused for cause and preemptory challenges, is unlikely to mirror the composition of the community on race, ethnic background, and gender. † A. The Venire The first step in composing an impartial jury is to ensure that the venire will draw from a cross-section of the community. Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, â€Å"[w]hen any large and identifiable segment of the community is excluded from jury service, the effect is to remove from the jury room qualities of human nature and varieties of human experience, the range of which is unknown and perhaps unknowable. † Washington State selects jurors’ names at random from voter registration and driver’s license and â€Å"identicard† records. The use of voter registrations in the compilation of other states lists exclusively has created disparity. In a majority of other states, present jury selection procedures often result in juries composed predominantly of persons who are white, middle-aged, members of the middle and upper socioeconomic classes, and from suburban or rural areas. This results in the exclusion of African Americans, the poor, the young, and various other minority groups. The disparity created by use of voter registration is especially clear in the numbers of minorities represented on the lists. The sole use of these records is therefore tantamount to willful systematic exclusion. According to a 1980’s voting and registration report completed by the Bureau of the Census, only 35. 5% of voting age individuals of Hispanic origin in the United States registered to vote in the 1988 presidential elections. African Americans showed a higher rate of registration than the Hispanic population. However, in the United States they still had a lower registration percentage (64. 5%) than white voters (67. 9%). In areas where a sizeable minority population exists, as in California where the racial minorities together outnumber the total Caucasian population, voter registration lists are likely to be inherently under-representative of a minority populace.

The Tech That Ignited the Communication Revolution

The 19th century saw a revolution in communications systems that brought the world closer together. Innovations like the telegraph allowed information to travel over vast distances in little or no time, while institutions such as the postal system made it easier than ever for people to conduct business and connect with others. Postal System People have been using delivery services to exchange correspondence and share information since at least 2400 B.C. when the ancient Egyptian pharaohs used couriers to spread royal decrees throughout their territory. Evidence indicates similar systems were used in ancient China and Mesopotamia as well.   The United States established its postal system in 1775 before independence had been declared. Benjamin Franklin was appointed the nations first postmaster general. The founding fathers believed so strongly in a postal system that they included provisions for one in the Constitution. Rates were established for the delivery of letters and newspapers based on delivery distance, and postal clerks would note the amount on the envelope. A schoolmaster from England, Rowland Hill, invented the adhesive postage stamp in 1837, an act for which he later was knighted.Hill also created the first uniform postage rates that were based on weight rather than size. Hills stamps made the prepayment of mail postage possible and practical. In 1840, Great Britain issued its first stamp, the Penny Black, featuring the image of Queen Victoria. The U.S. Postal Service issued its first stamp in 1847. Telegraph The electrical telegraph was invented in 1838 by a Samuel Morse, an educator and inventor who made a hobby of experimenting with electricity. Morse wasnt working in a vacuum; the principal of sending electrical current via wires over long distances had been perfected in the previous decade. But it took Morse, who developed a means of transmitting coded signals in the form of dots and dashes, to make the technology practical.   Morse patented his device in 1840, and three years later Congress granted him $30,000 to build the first telegraph line from Washington D.C. to Baltimore.  On May 24, 1844, Morse transmitted his famous message, What hath God wrought?, from the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., to the B O Railroad Depot in Baltimore. The growth of the telegraph system piggybacked on the expansion of the nations railway system, with lines often following rail routes and telegraph offices established at train stations large and small across the nation. The telegraph would remain the primary means of long-distance communication until the emergence of the radio and telephone in the early 20th century. Improved Newspaper Presses Newspapers as we know them have been printed regularly in the U.S. since the 1720s when James Franklin (Ben Franklins older brother) began publishing the New England Courant in Massachusetts. But early newspaper had to be printed in manual presses, a time-consuming process that made it difficult to produce more than a few hundred copies. The introduction of the steam-powered printing press in London in 1814 changed that, allowing publishers to print more than 1,000 newspapers per hour. In 1845, the American inventor Richard March Hoe introduced the rotary press, which could print up to 100,000 copies per hour. Coupled with other refinements in printing, the introduction of the telegraph, a sharp drop in the cost of newsprint, and an increase in literacy, newspapers could be found in nearly every town and city in the U.S. by the mid-1800s. Phonograph Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the phonograph, which could both record sound and play it back, in 1877. The device converted sound waves into vibrations that in turn were engraved on a metal (later wax) cylinder using a needle. Edison refined his invention and began marketing it to the public in 1888. But early phonographs were prohibitively expensive, and wax cylinders were both fragile and hard to mass produce. By the turn of the 20th century, the cost of photographs and cylinders had dropped considerably and they became more commonplace in American homes. The disc-shaped record we know today was introduced by Emile Berliner in Europe in 1889 and appeared in the U.S. in 1894. In 1925, the first industry standard for playing speeds was set at 78 revolutions per minute, and the record disc became the dominant format.   Photography The first photographs were produced by Frenchman Louis Daguerre in 1839, using silver-plated metal sheets treated with light-sensitive chemicals to produce an image. The images were incredibly detailed and durable, but the photochemical process was very complicated and time-consuming. By the time of the Civil War, the advent of portable cameras and new chemical processes allowed photographers like Matthew Brady to document the conflict and average Americans to experience the conflict for themselves. In 1883, George Eastman of Rochester, New York, had perfected a means of putting film on a roll, making the process of photography more portable and less expensive. The introduction of his Kodak No. 1 camera in 1888 put cameras in the hands of the masses. It came pre-loaded with film and when users had finished shooting, they sent the camera to Kodak, which processed their prints and sent the camera back, loaded with fresh film. Motion Pictures A number of people contributed innovations that led to the motion picture we know today. One of the first was the British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who used an elaborate system of still cameras and trip wires to create a series of motion studies in the 1870s. George Eastmans innovative celluloid roll film in the 1880s was another crucial step, allowing large quantities of film to be packaged in compact containers.   Using Eastmans film,  Thomas Edison and William Dickinson had invented a means of projecting motion picture film called the Kinetoscope in 1891. But the Kinetoscope could only be viewed by one person at a time. The first motion pictures that could be projected and shown to groups of people were perfected by the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumià ¨re. In 1895, the brothers demonstrated their Cinematographe with a series of 50-second films that documented everyday activities like workers leaving their factory in Lyon, France. By the 1900s, motion pictures had become a common form of entertainment in vaudeville halls throughout the U.S., and a new industry was born to mass-produce films as a means of entertainment. Sources Alterman, Eric. Out of Print. NewYorker.com. 31 March 2008.Cook, David A., and Sklar, Robert. History of the Motion Picture. Brittanica.com. 10 November 2017.Longley, Robert. About the U.S. Postal Service. ThoughtCo.com. 21 July 2017.McGillem, Clare. Telegraph. Brittanica.com. 7 December 2016.Potter, John, U.S. Postmaster General. The United States Postal Service An American History 1775 – 2006. USPS.com. 2006.History of the Cylinder Phonograph. Library of Congress. Accessed 8 March 2018.