Capital Punishment

As society has progressed through time, people like to think that we as people are also progressing. We think that we are continually getting smarter and learning from our mistakes. We are definitely seeing the errors that our ancestors have made, but are we really learning from them? We see the same things happening over and over again; the stock market crashed in 1929, due in part to mistakes made by people, and very similar things led to the recession in 2008. Throughout history, we can see that different forms of death sentences have existed. Many different reasons for these death sentences appeared. In some cultures, execution was used to punish criminals, in others it was used to crush political opposition to those that unsuccessfully challenge those in power. Back in ancient times, the ways that people were murdered were quite gruesome, like being burned alive or boiled to death. These deaths served a purpose, as they were often public and attempted to deter people from attempting the same crimes and suffer the same fate. People in civilizations to follow tried to become more and more civil; for example, the guillotine cut off the heads of its victims immediately causing no physical harm to people while creating a public scene for all to see. People have used firing squads to kill people since the rifle was invented, and this too can be a quite humane way to kill someone. By using more that one person in a firing squad, no one knows who actually killed the victim. This is quite unlike the guillotine that has a someone that pulls the pin to kill the person. This can be a problem because while it does not create pain for the victim, it can cause some emotional pain for the executioner, who has to deal with the fact that he or she has killed someone, which can weigh on someone's mind very heavily, no matter how much the person deserved it. In America today, we use lethal injection to punish people to death, and this has quite a few complications. First of all, the price to actually create the murderous concoction costs quite a bit of money, and it is not made in America. Therefore, Americans cannot control the amount of the solution is produced. As a result, people some prisons have basically been putting everything under the kitchen sink into the mix in order to attempt to kill people. This can also lead to people not being killed humanely, as we can see from some examples in American history. For example, Angel Diaz was sentenced to death, but when he was lethally injected, he did not die. It took a second dose after a half an hour, and Diaz felt extreme pain before finally dying. By killing people with lethal injection we are not only exposing people to extreme pain on occasion when trying to kill them without harm before death, but we are also creating an executioner that will too experience pain from these events. This shows that although we say and try to learn from our mistake, we often times revert back to the thing that we are trying to avoid.