INTRODUCTION
Punishment has always been used by the society to discourage would-be criminals from committing crimes. The fact that the society has the uppermost interest in preventing acts such as murder; it should use the harshest punishment available to dissuade murder. The only punishment that seems appropriate t is the death penalty. If these criminals receive the death sentence and are executed, then potential criminals will think twice before committing murder since the consequence is death. This, however, has lead to several misjudgments and innocent people have received the death sentence.
The emotional urge for revenge is not a good reason for invoking an arrangement of capital punishment, with all its supplementary risks and problems. Our criminal justice system and laws should guide us to higher ideologies that demonstrate an absolute respect for living, even the life of a killer. Encouraging our motives of vengeance, which ends in another killing, extends the sequence of hostility. Allowing executions sanction murder as a form of revenge.
Many victims' families condemn the use of the capital punishment. Using an execution to try to right the wrong of their loss is an insult to them and only causes more pain than the pain caused by the demise of their loved one.
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms. Almost every cell in a person’s body has the same deoxyribonucleic acid. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus, but a small amount of deoxyribonucleic acid can also be found in the mitochondria. This DNA can be used to properly recognize an individual as every person has a different DNA orientation. DNA can be used to solve cases in court as it can be used as evidence.
According to Prejean (251), the Louisiana legislature passed a resolution mandating that capital defendants on trial and death row inmates with issues of innocence to have access to DNA testing. However, no funding was provided for this decision and as a result, only a few lucky defendants with skilled and aggressive advocates were able to get the DNA testing. According to Simon (227), a similar situation also played out in Texas. In Texas, however, the legislature mandated this process to slow moving court and an overworked system. Only a few inmates could access DNA testing. However the provision of the DNA testing was not a magic bullet. The biological evidence that was required to perform the DNA testing may have been missing. Prosecutors destroyed most of biological evidence or stored in unreachable places at that time.
Texas’s current post-conviction DNA testing act imposes a number of restrictions on the death row inmate’s admission to testing. Among the act’s many restrictions is that a death row convict may not be afforded right to use to DNA testing. The testing could be used only if such testing would show with reasonable probability that he or she should not have been sentenced to death.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The government of Texas should adjust its post-trial testing act to ensure that DNA testing is obtainable to a convict who is seeking to show that a likelihood exists that he or she is not guilty of a crime or did not engage in the manner that was obtainable to the information seeker at some point during the sentencing stage of his or her principal trial. In addition, Williams (64) argues that DNA testing has to be allowed on as new evidence in regard to the rules of proof and safeguards the prevailing chain of safekeeping. This should be done even if the evidence was not available in relation to the convict’s crime. The obligation that identity was or is an issue in the case also should be not used—principally as concerns over comparative culpability have an important bearing on the eligibility to be tried for principal murder, as well as the decision to condemn the defendant to death. In addition, given the complexity in foreseeing potential advances in forensic science, the Texas government should include a stipulation that provides the court discretion to order post-conviction testing if it is in the interests of justice. Finally, given the likelihood of error regardless of the advances of science, reliable allegations of fault in past DNA testing should give rise to admission to re-testing of biological proof.
CONCLUSION
Works cited
Prejean, Helen. The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions.
Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2006. Print.
Simon, Dan. In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 2012. Internet resource.
Williams, Mary E. Is the Death Penalty Fair?San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2003. Print.
