An Indefensible Punishment by The New York Times - Article Example

The article makes its points through a combination of statistics and appeals to major studies, all pointing towards the death penalty being used on innocent people.This article is thoroughly convincing. One of its greatest strengths is the fact that it is able to draw from a wide variety of statistics and sources that appeal to reason. In one example, for instance, the article points out that under the current death penalty system “17 innocent people sentenced to death have been exonerated and released based on DNA evidence, and 112 other people based on other evidence,” which clearly shows that the court themselves admit they were wrong in sentencing 119 people to death.

This forces the reader to consider the fact that if the courts know for certain that many people were wrongfully sentenced, there were probably a few unlucky people who were wrongfully sentenced and then put to death. This article also makes good use of weighty authority, in one case quoting a “major study done for the Senate Judiciary Committee” which demonstrated that incompetent lawyers were a major factor in many capital cases. Often the death penalty is something where emotions weigh heavily, and doing something to drive home the emotional side of this issue would have made this more effective.