by Tracy Phernetton

Created on: November 27, 2008

The Anti-Death Penalty Movement

Conscious Evolution or Ethical Awareness?

Tracy Phernetton

The human race has a history of violence. Humans have a dualistic nature; they can love and they can hate. The two elements to the human experience are love and fear. We have two choices available to us when approaching life. We can either choose fear or we can choose love. Fear and love bring with them an endless amount of complexities. Fear manifests through emotions like anger, revenge, resentment, envy and greed. And love manifests through avenues like compassion, forgiveness, understanding and tolerance. Conflicts arose when one human looked at another human as inferior or "bad" for whatever reason. Somewhere along the way, humans gave birth to a social structure designed to make separations between the "good" and the "bad" people.

With that said, judgment had to be at the heart of those separating measures humans created. The power structures that evolved over human history has given power to some people that people that choose fear over love with all of their dealings.
The first established laws of the death penalty date back all the way to the eighteenth century BC. The "eye for an eye" outlook has biblical origins. Revenge has been the quick fix answer to solving the human dilemmas of crime. From Babylonia to colonial times and even to the existing modern day protocol, punishing humans for their crimes by killing them is the favorable solution in many people's eyes. However, human consciousness seems to be evolving to new levels of awareness that see this act of punishment as unnecessary, contradicting, and just plain inhumane. A movement is occurring among humans to abolish the death penalty. This movement ushers in new insights and revelations regarding the act of putting someone to death "lawfully." The growing anti-death penalty movement sees through the lawful justifications and sees the truth.
Killing someone because they killed someone else, perpetuates more violence. The contradicting method of inflicting death on someone because they did it first is in all actuality primitive. This paper is going to take an in-depth look at the death penalty, the arguments for and against, and the social movement to abolish the death penalty. I will look at the various angles and perceptions of the death penalty. And more importantly I will attempt to uncover the human motivations underlying revenge, unforgiveness, and violence.
[Mahatma Gandhi remarked that: "An eye

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