The Race, Age, and Social Status of Death Row.
People who oppose the Death Penalty have long argued that the system of putting criminals on death row is unfair, favoring the white and the wealthy. The startling statistics behind the death penalty and death row inmates is a large factor in their argument. This paper is going to tell about the people who have been executed and the people who are currently on death row. It will not only focus on the statistics amongst the races but also will discuss the average age, social status, and educational achievement of the people sentenced to die, the difference in the crimes that got them sentenced, and the small amount of women who have been faced with this court decision. The sentencing of death is claimed to have double standards based on these characteristics. I will present the facts and let you, the reader, form your own opinion on whether or not these claims against the death penalty are true or not.
Surprisingly, the ages of the people who have been faced with the death penalty does not really very. The average age at the time the crime is committed is 30. The numbers adding to this average, for the most part, are pretty consistent in staying very close to this number. The average age of inmates on death row is 40.87 and the average age at the time of execution is 42.75. Inmates are on death row for an average of eleven years and five months. According to www.deathpenalty/history.org, juveniles have played a small role in the death penalty but it has been an important one. The first juvenile ever executed was back in 1642. Only three hundred and forty nine out of the nineteen thousand confirmed executions since 1608 have been juveniles. There are fifty-eight that are currently on death row. The cases of these children have allowed the states that carry out the death penalty to put an age limit on the people they can execute. Seventeen out of the states that support the death penalty use 18 as the minimum age, five use the age seventeen, and the last seventeen states use the age sixteen.