Capital Punishment

I think capital punishment is definitely an issue that could be examined in this course. Capital punishment in the modern era encompasses the death penalty, carried out different ways in different places. Already this year in the United Sates four people have been put to death via lethal injection. The death penalty is an extremely polarizing topic which causes heated debate amongst many groups of people. Often times, the people sentenced to death have committed horrific crimes for which death looks like the only fair retribution, but there are cases when things are not black and white. In my mind, there is nothing scarier for the criminal justice system than carrying out the execution of an innocent man. Having recently read the John Grisham non-fiction book The Innocent Man, I found the process by which the death sentence is handed out very interesting. With this topic, I would like to investigate the fairness of death penalty trials as well as alternatives, such as life imprisonment, where a mistake could eventually be corrected