Death Penalty

 The stages in a court case helps determine whether or not someone will receive the death penalty.  In some of the stages that protect the rights of the accused. The defendant is innocent until proven guilty; there is a stage where the jury decides whether or not there is enough proof to accuse someone to receive the death penalty, which is a criminal hearing. They defendants has to be determined guilty without a reasonable doubt. After determining guilt or innocence, the jurors are tested by the court to see whether or not the accused should receive the death penalty. Than the prosecutor opinion of the death penalty. During this decision, the jury is required to consider the defendants background of his childhood to see if there is an traumatic incidents that are-accounted during his Young age. Also they look to see if the man has any mental retardation.The defendant is also protected in these stages by allowing for there to be a new trial if the accused felt there was not sufficient evidence or they can try to get clemency in order to not receive the death penalty. In my opinion these stages that the court set up do help to determine that a person is guilty. The jury also gives the defended a chance because they are not aloud to convict someone if the they ate unsure.  This just proves that the defendant has a fair judged case with all these process that go through a regular court system.options to be fairly judged.
             If the defendant is proven guilty and is given the death penalty there are many was of execution one is getting hung, firing squad, and three lethal injection. The firing squad and being hung are very inhumane. Most people don fully die when they are hung, their neck does not fully break and they slowly die by being suffocated. When use the firing squad method, the shooter can sometimes miss the vital organs by intention or by accident. The prisoner them would die a slowly death. I think these two methods are inhuman and are considered cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment. The reason it is cruel and unusual is because we have the technology such as lethal injection that makes you die with out pain.
      The charts i looked at showed the 16 states had the death penalty. Another interesting fact i found was only 12 people have been executed during 1976 but over all Texas has killed 475 death row inmates. What really strikes me is that Texas has a murder rate of 5 per 100,000 and are own state has a higher rate of 5.5 per 100,000. The method that we use is lethal injection. On other charts I saw, a few of the states had over 1200 people executed in that one state alone before the year 1976.
This really shocks me because we really never know who many of these people were killed when they might have been innocent. If the system just waited for more evidence we could have save many life's.