Should Capital Punishment be Abolished? Discuss.

Capital Punishment is a legal execution by the government body to put someone to death when one commits a crime. For simplicity, it means death penalty. However, there are many factors which make us question the purpose of capital punishment. According to National Coalition To Abolish The Death Penalty (NCADP), evidence has come to light that indicates that four men may have been wrongfully executed in recent years for crimes they did not commit - an error rate that is appalling and unacceptable when talking about life and death. Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that since 1977, the number of blacks and whites that have been the victims of murders are almost in equal numbers, yet 80% of the people executed in that period were convicted of murders involving white victims. National Coalition To Abolish The Death Penalty (NCADP) showed that scientific studies have consistently failed to demonstrate that executions deter people from committing crime any more than long prison sentences. Moreover, states without the death penalty have much lower murder rates. Capital punishment should be abolished due to wrongful execution, discrimination and deterrence.

There have been many cases of wrongful executions that are caused by misconduct of forensic science. According to innocenceproject.org, Chicago lab technician, Pamela Fish, testified for the prosecution about false matches and suspicious results in the trials of at least eight defendants who were convicted, then proven innocent years later by DNA testing. To think that scientific evidences are the most solid evidences to determine one’s innocence or guilt, this is an appalling number of false convictions. If nobody were to reinvestigate these cases, the ‘criminals’ would have never gotten their due innocence back even after they were sentenced. DNA exonerations and new evidence in other cases had shown that F. Zain, former director of the West Virginia state crime lab, had fabricated results, lied on the stand about results and wilfully omitted evidence from his reports when testifying in court trials during his career. One of the victims of such misconduct was C. Jones who was convicted in 1989, for shooting a liquor-store owner and was executed in 2000 based on the only physical evidence found at the crime scene – a strand of hair. In 2007, the Innocence Project, along with the Texas Observer, the Innocence Project of Texas and the Texas Innocence Network filed a lawsuit to obtain the hair for DNA testing. It was then later revealed that the strand of hair found at the scene did not belong to Jones. Such mistakes by the court is disturbing, thinking that the state had sentenced an innocent to death while the real perpetrator has the innocent taking the blame for him while he runs scot-free endangering others’ lives out there. A two-year investigation of the Houston Police Department, completed in 2007 showed that evidence in that lab was mishandled and results were misreported, in which the final report cited approximately 600 cases where DNA and serology, or blood-typing, evidence in convictions needed to be reviewed. This is more evident in the past when advanced scientific technology is not yet prevalent or invented, making the “experts” more prone to mishandle or misinterpret specimens of evidence in the crime scene and eventually leads to the wrong execution of innocent people. Thus, capital punishment should be abolished.

Another wrongful execution of innocents would be due to false confessions provided by witnesses. According to Innocence Project, in 16%, or forty cases, innocent defendants falsely confessed. All but two of the 40 who falsely confessed were said to have confessed in detail. Their confessions were contaminated; of those who confessed: fourteen had low IQs or developmental disabilities; three more (at least) were mentally ill and thirteen were juveniles. In 2009, there had been 22 new cases of DNA exonerations of people wrongly convicted. The overall total is 258, and the Innocence Project reports that roughly 25% had given false confessions. One of such cases was E. J. Lloyd who was convicted in 1984 for murder of a 16-year-old girl in Detroit. During several interviews, police fed details of the crime to Lloyd, who was mentally ill, and convinced him that by confessing he was helping them “smoke out” the real killer. Lloyd eventually signed a confession and gave a tape-recorded statement and only then in 2002, DNA testing proved that Lloyd was innocent. Sometimes, law enforcements use harsh interrogation tactics such as coercion with uncooperative suspects. However, some police officers, when are convinced of a suspect’s guilt would occasionally use tactics so persuasive that makes an innocent person feel compelled to confess. Some suspects have confessed to avoid physical harm of discomfort while others are threatened that they would be convicted with or without a confession, and that their sentence will be more lenient if they confess. Some are even told that a confession is the only way to avoid the death penalty. Such interrogation techniques often leave suspects, whether innocent or guilty as well as witnesses to feel mentally exhausted or develop a sense of belief that they can only be released if they comply and answer to whatever is expected to them. In addition, if someone were to rephrase the questions in such a way that causes the person being interrogated to misinterpret the question and in turn, develop misinformation effect of recalling false events, it may be life-costing instead of helping in proving their innocence. Hence, capital punishment should be banned so as to prevent grave mistakes of wrongful executions and to have a chance of exonerating the innocents.

Capital punishment convicts whoever commits a sinuous crime, however, there have been cases of discrimination and one of such is race discrimination. Louisiana Law Review (2011) by Pierce & Radelet revealed that in Louisiana, the odds of a death sentence were 97% higher for those whose victim was white than for those whose victim was black. Another report based on the same authors, in Santa Clara Law Review (2005) discovered that in California, those who killed whites where over 3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks and over 4 times more likely than those who killed Latinos. These statistics show a sense of racial bias in which the colored – who represent only around a quarter of the whole United States (U.S) population, comprise 43% of the total executions since 1976. Hence, letting people to start raising doubts over the capital punishment system of whether or not these people were convicted based on the level of seriousness of the crimes they committed or were they sentenced to a death penalty based on their skin colour.

The purpose of capital punishment is to punish whoever commits a crime, however it is revealed that capital punishment has no beneficial effects on deterring crime rates. U.S. Attorney General J. Reno (2000) claimed that “I have inquired for most of my adult life about studies that might show that the death penalty is a deterrent. And I have not seen any research that would substantiate that point.” New York Times survey conducted by R. Bonner & F. Fessenden, called Absence of Executions (2000) demonstrated that the homicide rate in states with capital punishment have been 48% to 101% higher than those without the death penalty. It is reported that ten out to twelve states without the death penalty have homicide rates below the national average, whereas half of the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above. Statistics provided by the deathpenaltyinfo.org also proved that the murder rates in non-death penalty states has remained consistently lower than the rate in states with the death penalty and the gap has been growing since 1990. This is because those who commit serious crimes such as murder do not consider the consequences of their actions. Most either do not expect to be caught because they have planned well ahead to come out with possible alibis and covering up of any evidences that might be found, before deciding to take actions, or the opposite of not carefully weighing the seriousness of crime they are about to commit as well as the consequences between a possible execution and life in prison before they act. Moreover most who belong to the latter, such commit murder in the spurt of a moment especially when one is blinded with anger or when they are in the midst of drug abuse where they cannot take full control of their mind and be fully responsible of their own actions.

Capital punishments may seem like a ‘powerful’ punishment to deal with criminals that commit grave crimes, however many factors have led people to doubt on its worth as there have been rising cases of wrongful executions of innocents due to misconduct of forensic science and false confessions by defendants, a sense of racial discrimination against the coloured and lastly, capital punishment have not proven its effectiveness in curbing crime rates. Capital punishment is an imperfect justice system where the defendants are given minimal legal attention by often lesser qualified individuals as whatever they say become heavily suspicious and unconvincing due to the crimes they were charged to have committed. Some would blame the court system rather than death penalty itself for the problems; it is intolerable to have performed any mistakes that would inevitably cost someone else’s life, particularly the innocent. Moreover, while the victim’s family are forced to suffer a loss of a closed one, by with capital punishment, it extends out to the defendant’s family to suffer as well. So why double the suffering? Instead of capital punishment, life imprisonment is a worse punishment and a much more effective deterrent. In fact, death penalty may be too good a punishment to those criminals as they would be executed thus ending their sufferings almost instantaneously. With life imprisonment, prisoners are confined in cells most of the time for the rest of their lifetime where the guilt, remorse and pain goes on for decades.

References:

Deterrence: States Without the Death Penalty Have Had Consistently Lower Murder Rates | Death Penalty Information Center. (n.d.). Death Penalty Information Center. Retrieved December 23, 2012, from http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without-death-penalty-have-had-consistently-lower-murder-rates#stateswithvwithout

Deterrence. (n.d.). NCADP - The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Retrieved December 23, 2012, from http://www.ncadp.org/index.cfm?content=25

Facts & Figures. (n.d.). NCADP - The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Retrieved December 23, 2012, from http://www.ncadp.org/index.cfm?content=5

Facts about the Death Penalty. (n.d.). Death Penalty Information Center. Retrieved December 23, 2012, from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf

Racial Bias. (n.d.). NCADP - The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Retrieved December 23, 2012, from http://www.ncadp.org/index.cfm?content=19

The Innocence Project - Understand the Causes: False Confessions / Admissions. (n.d.). The Innocence Project - Home. Retrieved December 23, 2012, from http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-Confessions.php

The Innocence Project - Understand the Causes: Forensic Science Misconduct. (n.d.). The Innocence Project - Home. Retrieved December 23, 2012, from http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Forensic-Science-Misconduct.php

Causes of Stress in Today's Society

Stress appears to be the natural outcome of the demands that life places on individuals and families, just like what H. Selye mentioned, “If you are alive, there is stress in your life.” Stress is often described as a feeling of being overwhelmed, worried or run-down. Stress can affect people of all ages, genders and circumstances and can lead to both physical and psychological health issues. According to Baum (1990), “Stress is any uncomfortable emotional experience accompanied by predictable biochemical, physiological and behavioural changes.” Based on a 2010 survey conducted by the American Psychological Association (APA), “More adults report that their stress is increasing than decreasing. 39 percent said their stress had increased over the past year and even more said that their stress had increased over the past five years (44 percent).” So what makes people so stressed out? Majority of the people experience stress due to family issues and work.

  

Stress caused by family is due to several factors. Based on Y.H Chan in Singapore Medical Journal (2005), ‘family’ scored a mean of 57.38 in being a contributor to stress in Singaporeans and according to a 2010 survey conducted by the American Psychological Association (APA), 57% of the respondents responded that ‘family responsibilities’ as being the source of their stress. In which women are more likely to experience stress than men (28 percent vs. 20 percent) and married women are reported to have higher level of stress than single women. This is because such women experience something others do not – prenatal maternal stress. It is very taxing on women, especially in today’s society where most have to juggle between their job and welfare of their families. Expectant mothers have to experience morning sickness during the first few stages of pregnancy, and some even throughout the period of their pregnancy and not to forget the psychological and physical toll on their bodies for having to be extra careful and pay extra attention to minute details to everything they do in order to ensure a healthy and safe delivery with no complications. Having to fret over all these things eventually causes anxiety and in turn – stress. According to First 5 LA (2004), anxiety is the strongest stress-related risk factor for preterm birth, in which the types of anxiety include fears and anxiety about the outcome of the pregnancy, the experience of labour, the ability to care for a new baby, and the health and well-being of the baby. A survey conducted by ndhealth.gov (2008) revealed that 72% of mothers experienced at least one stressful event in the 12 months before their baby’s birth and women who had experienced at least one major stressful event during the course of pregnancy had a higher prevalence of several pregnancy complications such as preterm labour as compared to women without a stressful event. Hence, anxiety causes expectant mothers to feel stress and in turn also cause complications during the course of pregnancy.

The birth of a child though can be a joyous and eagerly awaited event; however, it can also create many new changes within the family. Fatigue, increased responsibilities and new schedules that often accompany parenthood can add to the stress already experienced by the mother and family. To make matter worse, stressors like having a child born with special needs can increase stress levels of family by folds. Oxfordjorunals.org revealed a regression analysis of the factors causing most stress in carers of children who needs special attention were; in order of importance: behaviour problems in the child, night-time disturbance, stigmatization by the society, adversity in the family, multiplicity of impairments, difficulty in settling the child at night, problems with the child's health, problems with the child's appearance, and money worries. Most of these mothers have limited family opportunities as their child require special attention and most often than not, are unable to play normally as normal kids do. There is also the stress of lifetime care for the child such that the prospect of permanent dependency is overwhelming. Another cause of stress would be having to worry not being able to outlive the child and who to take over the role of caring for their kid should they one day become unable to take care of him be it financially, psychologically or physically as the community has little provision for their kid’s wellbeing when parents can no longer care for their child. A study by R. Bouma and R. Schweitzer (1990) found that mothers of autistic children have to cope with additional stress like social isolation and stigma that are associated with psychological disorders such as the negative responses towards the behaviour of their autistic child can be highly stressful to them. M. Bristol mentioned in The Effects of Autism on the Family that such negative responses “may become particularly acute as the child gets older and the community has less tolerance for deviant behaviour in someone who appears to be a normal adult.” Moreover, parents may self-inflict stress on themselves by blaming themselves for their child’s condition, and this feeling is especially strong for those who were instigated by close relatives and in-laws’ as well as the feeling of being less competent than other parents. All these factors heighten stress levels of members of family.

Children-related stress aside, another stressor in family context would be money. According to the American Psychological Association (2010), ¾ of participants responded that ‘money’ being their source of stress. In the context of Singapore, based on Y.H Chan in Singapore Medical Journal (2005), ‘finance’ scored a mean of 66.97 in being a contributor to stress in Singaporeans. So why are so many people stressing over money issues? According to Mercer Worldwide City Quality of Living Survey (2012), Singapore ranked 6^th worldwide in cost of living, 2 positions higher than Hong Kong and based on the Consumer Price Index of Singapore in 2010, basic necessities such as housing, food and transport account for 63% of total spending and only 16% for recreation. So just imagine the daily stresses of having to brood over the cost of basic necessities and the monthly struggles to pay bills as well as the additional stress of other expenses for raising children in Singapore. This financial stress is even more evident with recession on the rise. In a Pew Research poll (2009), 13% of parents with adult children said the recession had forced a child to return home after living independently. Hence, this adds financial stress to older parents of having to provide for their kids again when they themselves have already retired and living off their pension funds.

Other than family that contributes to stress, another major contributor to stress is work.  As defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) (2003), “Work-related stress is the response people may have when presented with work demands and pressures that are not matched to their knowledge and abilities and which challenge their ability to cope.” According to the survey by the American Psychological Association (2010), 70% of respondents mentioned work as being the main cause of stress. To closer related to our society, it is further substantiated by asiaone.com (2009), where “69% of local (Singaporean) employees foreseeing an increase in stress for the rest of the year, second globally only to Japan.” In a video named Stress – Portrait of a Killer by National Geographic (2008), neurobiologist, R. Sapolsky of Stanford University studied the way of life of baboons to related stress in humans. It is found that stress is caused due to lack of control. It is found that subordinate baboons experience higher level of stress than the alpha male and similarly this can be applied in human working society; the lower the rank an employee is in the job hierarchy, the higher the level of stress. This is because, employees usually don’t have a say in making company decisions and can only comply with their higher-ups and following orders. It can be particularly stressful to employees if they encounter rigid and difficult leaders who demand and pressurise employees with jobs that are not matched with employees’ knowledge and abilities and exercise little room for discussion. With little control over their work and the constant pent up of “unjust” they have to endure with nowhere to release, thus resulting to the increase in stress level of workers. Moreover, if they have different perspective towards a particular task, it makes working together with their leaders more difficult thus adding the level of stress.

The higher managements experience stress that normal employees would not experience. Though workers of lower status in the corporate ladder experience work stress due to pressure from the higher-ups, but the higher-ups also have their own work stress that only they would experience and most of these stresses are often related to dire consequences that may affect the whole corporation or company. In a project carried out by Centre for Creative Leadership (CCL) called Ideas2Action (I2A), it is found that leaders experience stress equally between their bosses, peers, direct reports and customers. While employees stress over lack of control in their work, leaders stress over having too much to control. Project I2A also reported that task demands such as job responsibilities and decision making are the source of stress for leaders. Executives and top managements often have to make decisions that may affect the success or failure of the entire company thus also responsible in the job security of those under them. They carry huge responsibilities of how the company is to be run as well as managing workers in terms of work performances and interpersonal relationships and communications. They also have to be accountable for whatever decisions they make, should the decision be a wrong one, it could cause huge losses to the company, thus stress level increases. In worst-case scenario, this would reflect badly on their reputation in the business world and may be hard to climb back up to their original high standing in the corporate ladder. All these add on the amount of stress experienced by top executives. Moreover, many are also constantly concerned with poor management styles or with the possibility of competition with people of lower standing in job hierarchy overruling them if they are incapable in leading or maintaining in completing quality tasks and this is evidenced by the survey carried out by CCL that such competition ranked the highest (35%) as a contributor to stress by peers.

Stress is like a part and parcel of life and there are many causes of stress such as family stress that includes prenatal maternal stress, stress of caring for child with special needs and financial stress, and organizational stress such as work stress of employees and from leaders. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), prolong exposure to stress can be dangerous to our health, in which over time, continued strain on your body from routine stress may lead to serious health problems, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, anxiety disorder, and other illnesses. Therefore, it is important for us to know exactly what is stressing us out and from the main problem, work things out in order to manage and mitigate its negative effects. Some solutions in coping with stress would be to find people who can provide emotional and other support, especially close family and friends to related to them regarding stress in workplace or turn to the community or religious organizations for help regarding family issues. It is important to take own responsibility in recognizing signs of body responses to stress and avoid pessimism and dwelling over matters. With the correct positive mindset, it is possible to maintain a low stress level.  As mentioned by American Philosopher and Psychologist, W. James “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another,” it is up to ourselves in the ways we deal with stress and manage stress level.

References:

American Psychological Association (APA). (2010). Retrieved December 14, 2012, from http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/gender-stress.pdf

American Psychological Association (APA). (2011). Retrieved December 14, 2012, from http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2011/impact.pdf

Autism Research Institute. (n.d.). Retrieved December 14, 2012, from http://autism.com/ari/newsletter/053/page6.pdf

Biostatistics 308. Structural equation modeling. (2005). Home::National University Health System. Retrieved December 14, 2012, from http://www.nuhs.edu.sg/wbn/slot/u3344/biostats%20308%20Structural%20equation%20models.pdf

Demographics. (n.d.). Center for Creative Leadership: leadership at CCL.org, leadership Development, leadership Training, Executive Coaching, CCL. Retrieved December 14, 2012, from http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/research/StressofLeadership.pdf

Examining the Causes of Stress in Families with Severely Mentally Handicapped Children. (n.d.). Oxford Journals | Social Sciences | British Journal of Social Work. Retrieved December 14, 2012, from http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/5/501.short

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