September 21, 2016

Dear Presidential Candidates,

The Death Penalty. Something you both think should be a national punishment. That is just plain stupid. I mean, I respect your opinion and all, but not really.

I think that the Death Penalty is too strong of a consequence. How are people going to be taught to not kill by killing? Who the heck thinks that’s smart? All life is precious and you should not kill them as a consequence.

According to deathpenaltyinfo.org 30 states have the death penalty and 20 don’t. That’s ⅗ of our country. ⅗ more than we need. I know we don’t want our country known as a Care Bear Cartoon but there is a better option: Life without parole. There are currently over 121 people who have received this sentence in Oregon.

It costs millions to kill people. It is estimated about 9 million dollars a year are spent on total prosecutions and defense costs. We are in 19.3 trillion dollars of debt according to FY17 Federal Budget. Come on people, we should not be spending millions of dollars on killing people. Especially when the punishment is applied at random. Out of the 15,000 to 17,000 murders committed every year in the USA, 120 of them were sentenced to death. Less than 1%.

Also, God agrees with me too. Capital punishment goes against almost every religion.

Not to jump topics or anything, but I think we should talk about guns in schools. I think that schools should have guns in their classrooms. But the police should inspect the staff and teachers to see if they are stable enough. They could be psycho and tear down the school if given a gun without thought. A perfect solution if they pass the test by the police would be to put a gun in a locked box and all teachers have a key to open it when they have to. Once you open the box, an alarm should go off and it informs the authorities the gun has been taken out. That’s a smart solution. The teachers will be able to reach it in an emergency. I hope you take these ideas and use it. All these ideas are smart. This valuable information would be used to make the United States of America a better place with better laws.

I got this information from deathpenaltyinfo.org, debate.org, and oadp.org.

Sincerely,

Joey Scaravale

Mrs.Strebal 7th grade