Capital Punishment

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The poor and friendless defendants, those with inexperienced or court-appointed counsels, are most likely to be executed. For example, Orenthial James Simpson had the money to afford the best lawyers and was �guilty as sin,� but he was acquitted. According to Alison Coope, a disproportionate number of nonwhites are sentenced to death. Also, when the death penalty for rape was still used in many states, no white man was executed for raping a nonwhite woman; whereas, most black offenders found guilty of raping a white woman were executed (24).
The possibility that innocent people wrongly convicted of murder will be put to death in the United States is growing. Jet magazine states that the reason it is growing is because of the current emphasis on faster executions, fewer resources for the defense, and an expansion in the number of death cases mean that the execution of innocent people is inevitable. A report, which was conducted by the Death Penalty Information Center, ...

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