Seven Minutes
Seven minutes. A few words that carry with them the finality that comes with knowing nothing that is said will change the circumstances. The amount of time from a death row prisoner’s last statement until the time he is pronounced dead. In the land of the free and the brave, this does not seem like a fair way to treat citizens. America is the land of second chances, which our government throws away in seven minutes. No matter what the prisoner has done, they deserve what this country has promised them: an assurance that they have a right to life.
It is understandable why many states still have the death penalty in place. It helps with overpopulation in the prisons, reduces the risk of a prisoner escaping, assuring that the person who did wrong will forever be a memory and shows our justice system will deliver the punishment the people see fit. What it doesn’t bring is an end to the suffering of the victim’s families, the bills that keep piling up (execution is not cheap), and the heartache of the prisoner’s family, that sees everyday on the calendar an end date to their relative’s life. As for the prisoner himself? A life in prison is far more deteriorating than serving ten years of a sentence before being killed. The way America setup, it is not right to still be in the age of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Instead of the having the death penalty, our society should be focused on helping prisoners realize the depth and seriousness of their crimes and spending their lives in prison turning their lives around. Death row inmates should be commuted to life sentences. While this doesn’t help overpopulation in prisons, it would greatly improve America’s report with the European nations who are so against this policy, and show that American government is not going to take the risk of murdering possibly innocent or mentally challenged people. The question is not what to do in place of the death penalty, the question is how to work with what we already have, which is the life sentence with no possibility of parole.
Now is the time of reform. America should consider abolishing the death penalty and show that life in prison is a worse consequence than being put on Death Row, that during a life sentence, it is not waiting to die for these prisoners, it is a way to realize the severity of their crime and spend their lives contemplating that. The victim’s family will be assured that the vivacity of their relative’s life is realized and it is not forgotten what they have done and the pain they have caused said family. Seven minutes will no longer be enough to repent, to say everything that needs to be said, because some things need a lifetime.
This blog post is an official entry for the <a href="http://www.joshuapondlaw.com/scholarship">Law Blogger’s
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