Killing Inmates or life sentence

Persuasive Speech – Capital Punishment
Proposition: Errors in the execution of capital punishment should be examined and used
to abolish the practice.
Introduction:
On April 14 1985, 8-year-old Shandra Whitehead was raped, sodomized, beaten and strangled with her pajama bottoms on her bed. She was comatose for nine days thereafter and then died. In court, her mother, who said she saw the killer, pointed to Frank Lee Smith and sobbed “My baby. My baby”. Jurors voted unanimously for the electric chair. DNA evidence found him innocent in December 2000. Unfortunately, it came a little
too late. Metastasis had set him free long before the flawed justice system; Frank Lee Smith had died of pancreatic cancer in January of 2000. He died after serving 14 years for a crime he did not commit and for all he knew, he died a convicted man.

Dr. James Liebman, a law professor at Columbia’s School of Law published the first statistical study undertaken over a 23 years period...