EPQ: Capital Punishment in the USA

Capital Punishment in the United States of America

By Louis Totton

What I Learnt!

• How to manage and organise my time effectively

• How to reference sources properly

• Scanning quickly and effectively through long articles

Questions?

Evaluation

• In hindsight I would have chosen a more focused title

• Could have explored more factors within a particular reason for abolishment

• A problem was some states have abolished the death penalty for more than one reason

• Another was the time period over which states have abolished the death penalty

Racial Discrimination

• There were significant disparities with the race of the victim

• Prosecutors more likely to seek the death penalty for white victims

• White-victim cases more likely to receive death sentences

• Not as many disparities with the race of the defendant

Deterrent Effect

• Does the presence of the death penalty deter people from committing murders?

• Simple answer: no

• Generally when committing a murder, people are overwhelmed by their emotions e.g hate, anger

Miscarriage of Justice

• The very real possibility of someone being sentenced to death for a crime they didn't commit

• By the time the state has realised the prisoner is innocent, he/she will often have spent nearly half their life on death row

• Also the possibility of someone being executed for a crime they didn't commit

The Essay

• "Using certain states as examples, evaluate whether some of the reasons why states in the USA have abolished the Death Penalty apply to other States who have kept it"

• Cost of the death penalty

• Miscarriage of Justice

• Deterrent Effect

• Racial Discrimination

How I Researched My Project

Cost of the Death Penalty

• Mainly internet based research

• Newspaper and magazine articles

• Sentencing someone to death is more expensive than keeping them in prison for the rest of their life

• Reports

• Academic journals

• The legal procedures for a death penalty case is much more elaborate and consequently expensive

• Careful to use sources from established publishers

• Cross-referenced the information across different publishers to check for accuracy

• Even if no sentences are being handed down, having a death penalty system in place is still costing the state taxpayer a huge amount of money

• Didn't use sources from anti-death penalty organisations - too opinionated

Why this Topic?

• Its in the news!

• A topic with many different arguments

Planning My Project

• Gain a greater knowledge of the system of law in the United States

• Decided not to do an ethics-based project

• Initially planned to include other death penalty countries around the world

• Gain a greater insight into the system of the death penalty

• Then decided to research why certain states abolished the death penalty

• The uniqueness of the United States

• And consequently find the major faults in the death penalty systems of the USA

• Then comparing with states who have kept capital punishment

• To conclude whether the states have convincing reasons for keeping the death penalty