The Abolition Of Capital Punishment - 1778 Words

In my paper, the audience that I am targeting would be government officials, and society. I would like for the government officials who vote to choose which laws get passed and which ones don’t to really take into consideration the reasons why the death penalty is not necessary. I would also like to target society because if it becomes a very pressing issue, the government has to listen eventually. The death penalty is not something that should be taken lightly because of how fragile human life is. It can be taken in a moment’s notice, and once it’s gone, there is no bringing it back. These two audiences are very appropriate to my topic because these are the groups of people who have the power to make a change within the judicial†¦show more content†¦Because I am such a curious person, I had to ask what the death penalty meant. I was told that it was something that happened to people when they committed godawful acts such as murder. I was told that someo ne’s life gets taken because they took someone else’s life. Even as a child, this didn’t make much sense to me. I didn’t understand how taking one person’s life for taking the life of another was effective punishment because it always seemed so hypocritical to me. If it wasn’t right to kill someone in the first place, why was it right to kill someone for killing someone else? A couple of years later, when I was in high school, this topic was brought up again when the class had to give an argumentative speech about a controversial topic. My classmate chose to advocate for this topic while giving us a little bit of basic knowledge about it and the whole time I was in shock that someone would so readily be in support of the death penalty. The death penalty was first established in Eighteenth Century B.C. using the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon. During this time, the death penalty had been codified for twenty-five different crimes. It was al so a part of the Fourteenth Century B.C.’s Hittite Code. The Draconian code of Athens in Seventh Century B.C. allowed for the death penalty to be the only punishment for all crimes. The Fifth century B.C.’s Roman