Rogers / Period 3 Senator Chang

S.S._____

AN AMENDMENT
To abolish the sentence of capital punishment and the practice of the death penalty in the United States of America.
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Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE
This amendment may be cited as the 28th Amendment.
SECTION 2. FINDINGS
Congress hereby finds and declares that,
A) Up to 4% of prisoners sentenced to capital punishment were innocent but still executed, and many more inmates
are innocent but have not yet been proven so.
B) Certain counties in the United States are more known for sentencing defendants to capital punishment, and many
of them are concentrated in the South.
C) The death penalty may, even routinely, be applied inconsistently and unfairly, as there are lawyers that always
seek to receive a capital punishment sentence.
D) Poor and friendless defendants are unable to hire sufficiently skilled lawyers, and are forced to rely on district
hired attorneys that cannot sufficiently handle their cases. These attorneys often lose the cases of their clients, which
helps to send innocents to death row.
E) It takes years to prove death row inmates innocent of their crimes, if they are innocent.
F) Racial discrimination is evident in the death row system, especially in cases in the South where a majority of
inmates are black or Hispanic.
G) Life-without-parole sentences in the form of solitary confinement are generally seen as a fate worse than death.
H) Trials seeking to sentence a defendant to death cost much more than those seeking to sentence a defendant to lifewithout-parole in prison.
I) In Illinois, the error rate in convicting persons to death had reached over 50%, showing that the conviction rate of
innocents will likely only continue to increase.
J) The death penalty is unusually final, unlike all other sentences; once executed, the decision cannot be reversed,
unlike other sentences such as life imprisonment without parole or solitary confinement, both of which can
eventually be reversed.
K) All execution methods have been shown to be able to deliver some form of excruciating pain to the prisoner
before they actually die, including asphyxiation, severe burning to the point where the flesh itself burns, actual
combustion of human flesh, and lethal chemicals spreading throughout the body rather than directly to the heart of
the inmate.
SECTION 3. STATUTORY LANGUAGE
A) The United States Constitution will be amended as follows; Following the ratification of this amendment, no
person shall be sentenced to capital punishment. The practice of the death penalty is forbidden in the United States.
B) This amendment will be enforced by the Department of Justice and the judicial branch, with cooperation from
state departments. Funds previously used to enforce capital punishment and the death penalty will be redirected in
order to enforce this law, and an additional one billion dollars will be allocated from the budget of the Department of
Justice. This budget will be readjusted accordingly twenty years from the date on which this law goes into effect.
C) Any found breaking this law and its resulting amendment will be subject to penalties decided upon by the federal
judicial branch with help from the executive branch and state federal branches as needed. This law shall go into
effect on January 1st, 2020.

The 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution should be passed to abolish capital

punishment due to rights that are unprovided for in the 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments.
The 5th Amendment provides for the guarantee of due process, which includes several rights during
trials that are not given during many capital punishment cases. Due process includes the right to a fair and
public trial conducted in a competent manner, but this is not always given to the defendant during capital
punishment trials. In the case against Anthony Graves, prosecutor Charles Sebesta forced Robert Carter, the
actual and sole murderer, to testify against Graves by threatening to indict Carter's wife; his efforts singlehandedly caused Graves to be found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death when he had a solid
alibi and could be proved completely innocent. The equality of the system that sentences people to capital
punishment is inherently flawed to the point where it manages to break Constitutional amendments, and
should be abolished due to those faults.
The 6th Amendment gives defendants the right to have a lawyer defend them in court, but these
lawyers are not always reasonably trained and prepared. For instance, Hinton was accused of murder, but
the only evidence against him was the word of another victim and forensics evidence that six bullets from
the crime scenes had been fired from a gun that his mother owned (which was later proved to be false).
However, the defense's lack of up-to-date knowledge concerning state funding made him hire a forensics
expert who was unable to prove that the bullets were not fired from Hinton's gun, and thus the Supreme
Court intervened, stating that Hinton's trial attorney rendered constitutionally deficient performance
(Anthony Ray Hinton v. Alabama). His attorney's inability to keep up with current laws and thus provide
his client with the best possible defense was the key to Hinton being sentenced to capital punishment.
The 8th Amendment prevents the possibility of cruel and unusual punishment being delivered to
defendants, but in more ways than one, capital punishment in itself can be considered cruel and unusual
punishment. The state of Oklahoma, using the method of lethal injection, spent some 40 minutes trying to
kill Clayton Lockett before he finally died of a heart attack (Von Drehle). The capital punishment system
only serves to propagate inhumane acts and encourage harsh treatment of death row inmates who are
promised something else entirely.