Group Video: "Death Penalty and Anti Death Penalty: Is There a Middle Ground?"

It really is just wild to me that anyone can actually be in favor of the death penalty. Not only that but I also find numerous flaws in many of the arguments made by the people in the video who supported death row. For example, when one guy said that someone who did something bad doesn't deserve mercy, my first reaction was to question if death is perhaps too merciful. Wouldn't you rather a terrible person be forced to live their life in prison, having to spend each day with the regret over what they've done? And when they were discussing the woman who found and killed her child's rapist, they said it "was not her right" to kill the guy. By that logic, if it wasn't "her right" then whose right was it?

At the end of the day, I do believe that people deserve a second after a wrongdoing and I do believe that people can be rehabilitated back into society; and I'm not usually an optimist. In some cases, I believe that life in prison is even a worse (and more deserved) punishment than death. But my biggest argument is that there are many people on death row who are actually innocent. So yes, I agree that people who commit misdeeds should be punished in some way, but is death really the way to go?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Class Video: "Building Connections: How to Be A Relationship Ninja | Rosan Auyeung-Chen | TEDxSFU"

Video link:  Building Connections: How to Be A Relationship Ninja | Rosan Auyeung-Chen | TEDxSFU Being in my first year of year of college, making connections is a big part of my life right now. It's my first time living away from my family, my first time at such a big school, and my first time not being constantly surrounded by people I'm close to and comfortable with. So when I first got here, I was immediately confronted by the importance of learning to make connections or else my next four years would be really lonely. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at making connections. I'm really shy and introverted and insecure and I tend to get anxious and overwhelmed during social situations. So watching this video was actually quite helpful to me, as Rosan Auyeung-Chen was able to give me some decent insight and advice on the process of making connections. That being said, I would disagree with the idea that there's a step-by-step instructional process for making connec...
Read more

Class Video: "The myth of race | BBC Ideas"

 Video link: The myth of race | BBC Ideas Before watching this video, I didn't understand what people meant when they said that race is a social construct. I always thought that since people have physical characteristics that can indicate their race, that must mean that race is ingrained into our DNA in some way. I was blown away by the idea that I could have a closer relation of genomes with some random person of some random other race than I could with someone of my same race, but that makes the argument that race is a social construct make so much more sense to me. Since there's really nothing in our DNA that indicates our race then that must mean that race is something assigned to us by society. To be honest, race is something I've always been confused by in the sense that I'm not really sure what my race even is. I know I'm Hispanic on my dad's side and White on my mom's side. I've always identified more with my Hispanic side but am I Hispanic enoug...
Read more

Group Video: "Lock-Up: The Prisoners of Rikers Island"

There were many things that stood out to me while watching this film. The first thing I noticed was how a lot of the prisoners were still wearing their own clothes instead of some sort of prison uniforms. In a lot of movies and pieces of media we see prisoners forced to wear a uniform in order to strip them of their individuality (everyone's familiar with the black-and-white stripes or the bright orange jumpsuits) but that wasn't the case in this real-life prison. Another thing I noticed was the immense amount of segregation on Rikers Island. In the prison, not only are male and female prisoners separated but even gay prisoners had their own facility. Additionally, the prisoners would even separate themselves by race within their facilities. Lastly, it was somewhat disturbing to see just how many prisoners accepted the idea that that was their life now. We were introduced to some prisoners who had practically made homes out of their cells, with all their clothes and furniture a...
Read more