I believe that the death penalty is to cruel to be used by our government. The founding fathers trusted the future generations to interpret the constitution in a reasonable way. We have clearly failed to see reason when we couldn't understand that no cruel and unusual punishment meant no government funded murders.
Our government has shown that it believes murder is cruel and unusual by making it a capital crime, and worthy of the highest punishments our country can give. If we feel so strongly that murder is inhumane, utterly barbaric, and wrong in every sense of the word, why do we sanction it? Many would argue that the people who receive the death penalty have committed such terrible crimes that they deserve it. This type of thinking is extremely immature and significantly holds us back from making a more humane government. Revenge is a terrible thing, and should not be the motive of government actions. If someone is sent to jail for the rest of their lives it doesn't put the public at any more risk because they will be in their for life and will never have the chance to kill again. This being true the only reason we would give someone the death penalty is to satisfy our own primitive desire to see a person we hate die.
Others would argue that using the death penalty will make people refrain from committing crimes, however this logic is also flawed. Life in prison is one of the worst fates that could be given to someone. If the daunting prospect of spending the rest of your life in a cage doesn't prevent you from committing a crime nothing will. Killing capital crime offenders will not scare people into obedience, rather it will create a circle of violence between the American government and its people. For these reasons I strongly believe that we should not kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong.
