The Death Penalty Violates the Rights of Children of People Who Are Sentenced to Death
The entire legal process – from arrest to sentence to fulfillment of sentence – can be devastating to children of offenders. Children’s physical and mental health can be harmed. Many criminal justice systems do not recognize this as a major problem, and fail to offer appropriate resources to aid impacted minors.

It is long past time to abolish the death penalty in the U.S.
Capital punishment was halted in the U.S. in 1972 but reinstated in 1976, and since then, nearly 1,600 people have been executed. To whose gain? Study after study shows that the death penalty does not deter crime, puts innocent people to death, is racially biased, and is cruel and inhumane. It is state-sanctioned homicide, wholly ineffective, often botched, and a much more expensive punishment than life imprisonment. There is no ethical, scientifically supported, medically acceptable or morally justifiable way to carry it out.
Many countries view capital punishment inherently arbitrary and discriminatory.
These factors – as well as the unique psychological and physical trauma associated with the time leading up to and actual infliction of this punishment-make the death penalty cruel, degrading, and inhumane, according to a majority of nations. Although the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment specifically prohibits “cruel and unusual” punishment (evaluated based on “evolving standards of decency”), the U.S. Supreme Court has opined that capital punishment does not constitute a per se violation this clause-rendering the United States in the minority of countries that still deems such punishment permissible.
*The Advocates for Human Rights.org
Cruel and Inhumane
While the majority of nations have banned capital punishment as cruel, degrading, and/or inhumane treatment, such punishment has not yet been officially defined anywhere in the world as “torture.” Researchers assert that “death row phenomenon” – which encompasses a range of factors (such as prolonged solitary confinement, anxiety caused by lengthy periods awaiting execution, etc.) that produce severe mental and physical trauma for people on death row – warrants defining capital punishment as torture.
Courts Sentence Innocent People to Death
Criminal legal systems are not foolproof. Wrongful convictions occur. Inadequate legal representation, faulty evidence, discrimination and prejudice (on the part of prosecutors, judges, and juries), and eyewitness misidentification are only a handful of the myriad of reasons why innocent people are wrongfully sentenced to death and executed each year.
The Death Penalty Is Costly
Death penalty cases are very expensive, both for the defendant and for the legal system at large. Recent studies have shown that state judicial systems are spending millions of dollars on just a few death penalty cases each year.
The Innocence Project has represented innocent people who were wrongly convicted of murder and condemned to death in cases that were compromised by police and prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, eyewitness misidentification, unreliable forensic evidence, racial bias, and more. In some instances, our clients have come within days of execution. These cases powerfully establish that — notwithstanding legislative and constitutional guarantees of increased scrutiny for and oversight of such cases — the capital punishment system is deeply flawed and poses an unconscionable threat to innocent people. For these reasons, the death penalty must be abolished.
Since 1973, at least 190 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). A 2014 study estimated that at least 4% of those sentenced to death are innocent. These numbers don’t demonstrate the full scope of the impact that the death penalty has on the problem of wrongful conviction as the threat of the death penalty causes innocent people to plead guilty and induces false testimony from witnesses.