Background

In 1971 Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia held that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment, but in 1978 the justices voted on it again and it was re-instated as constitutional and allowed once more. Since then there have been many executions because of it and a lot of taxpaying dollars have been used towards funding these criminals on death row. There have also been cases where a person was incorrectly found innocent and unjustly suffered the morbid punishment. Proposition 34 replaces the death penalty with life imprisonment without parole. Some believe that it is crueler to let a person rot in prison for eternity. Many also believe that the just punishment for murder is death of the murderer. Although it was close, Prop 34 did not pass losing with only 47.7% of the votes.

-Michelle Rainey

Sources

http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=42

The Cons

Capital punishment is a difficult medium in our government to debate because there are so many different views of why it should be kept or not, some are moral, some are more pragmatic. There are a lot of problems with it. First off, it's costing American big bucks. Billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on it, money that could be used elsewhere, like possibly getting us out of debt. We are billions of dollars in debt and putting people on death row is just increasing that. Richard C. Dieter states, "The death penalty is clearly more expensive than a system handling similar cases with lesser punishment." These costs come from a variety of factors. First there's the cost of everything needed in a regular trial that doesn't concern death as punishment. Added onto that is more pre-trial time, experts, more attorneys, 2 trials instead of one, and a series of appeals. The many factors and lengthy trial period cause the death row process to have an extremely high price accredited with it. Life imprisonment without parol would be a better option because citizens still wouldn't have to worry about that person being out on the streets, and it's much cheaper.

Another problem with the death penalty is that it gets rid of a wrongly accused person's possible chance of proving themselves innocent. The man in the photograph to the right, Carlos Deluna, was convicted of murder and executed. Later evidence showed that he had not committed the crime and was wrongly accused. There are many others like this and most of the similar cases that could be out there are unknown since usually once a person is executed, the search for the criminal ends. Over 1,000 people have been executed since 1979 and there is a high change that many of those cases were flawed and the person was not guilty. That possibility of ending the life of an innocent man or woman makes many including myself believe that capital punishment should be demolished immediately, because quite frankly, a judge and the jury never know for sure what happened or who did what, all they can do is vote on what appears to be the case.

-Michelle R.

Sources

http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=42

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executed-possibly-innocent

http://deathpenalty.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=002000

Our Mission: To discuss the pros and cons of Prop 34 to prove and explain the rationality of the death penalty

About Us

We are a group doing a project for our English 115 class with Professor Rosenfeld at the California State University of Northridge. Our group members include Sarkis , Michelle, and Connor. Our assignment was to make a blog about Prop 34, and to explain both sides of the prop, explain what the pros and the cons, and in further detail the results of the proposition.  We, as a group, will analyze the Prop, answer frequently asked questions and conclude our blog with some final thoughts.

-Sarkis Yevrenyan