Article 5: Capital Punishment: Cruel and Unusual?

Source Citation:

Evans, Kim Masters. Capital Punishment: Cruel and Unusual? Detroit: Gale,
Cengage Learning, 2008. Print.

I checked out this book from the library the other day when I was doing research for this project. I found it was really interesting because it took a look at a lot of cases where many people were sentenced to death and why they were given the sentence. When I was reading up on the background of some of these sentences, I was kind of horrified at how...terrible, for lack of better word, some of them sounded. It almost made me think death was what the criminal deserved, but I put some more thought into this while letting the information soak in. I reached the conclusion that these were just cold, hard facts. There was nothing on whether the criminal felt remorse or not. Besides the section about adequate legal counsel, there wasn't much on whether the criminals were represented fairly. What if they had been too poor to afford a good lawyer? What if they were mentally retarded and couldn't properly answer questions they were asked? There are just so many twists that could be possible in every case that it's hard to tell whether the information was the whole truth. For example, under the heading "Legal Repesentation: Questions About Quality" there is a part that states that "some lawyers who have defended capital cases were inexperienced, ill trained, or incompetent" (Evans 83). Digressing a little bit, it boggles my mind that they would entrust a lawyer that could have no experience with someone's life - even if the client is a criminal. If there was a chance that the criminal could go through rehabilitation and become useful to society, why not take the chance instead of sending them to court on question of whether they should be executed or not?