Although, you may feel that planning your article is a waste of time and you wish to get writing, planning can save you time in the long run. Imagine that you were going on a hike from home to your cousin’s house twelve miles away through beautiful countryside. If you had never done it before and you set off without planning your route, you may know how to get the first couple of miles and then suddenly realise that you don’t know where to go once you get that far. It is the same with writing articles. Unless, you have the whole piece planned out point by point, you could go off on a tangent. Not only would this reduce the strength of your argument but it would waste your time too as you struggled to get to the conclusion.
You will find that if you format your plan so that you visualise it as if it is a court case in a law court, it will be much easier for you to structure it. Below is an example of a plan using the aforementioned argument. Fundamentally, because the argument protests about the death penalty, the plan is organised as if you were the defence counsel.
Introduction - make your claim – state your hypothesis and explain the steps that will help you to prove it. In this case it is, “past cases have proved that the death penalty is often carried out on innocent people and therefore to bring hanging back would result in a flawed system for justice.”
Prosecuting - At this point, you would imagine what arguments the prosecutor would make against your proposal. This would mean that the advocate was arguing for the death penalty to be brought back as a law.
Arguments to bring this law back:
- If a person takes another person’s life, they do not deserve to live themselves.
- While they continue to live, they are a constant danger to others.
- The cost of keeping a murderer alive is a huge drain on the tax payer.
- Hanging is a would be deterrent to other people that may consider taking the lives of others.
Although it is tempting to wash over the antithesis and not provide background evidence so that it is easier to prove your own argument, it is more persuasive to the reader if you provide a solid argument and evidence. For instance:
- You could research some past cases where murderers have been let out of prison and have gone on to commit murder again.
- You could provide figures of how much it costs to keep a prisoner incarcerated.
- You could also demonstrate if the murder rate had gone higher since the abolishment of hanging.
Using these facts will demonstrate that you have done the research but are still committed to your legal beliefs. Incidentally, as you provide each argument for the prosecution, you need to have a counter argument against it. This will strengthen your case and your article.
Defence - At this point, you need to be able to provide evidence of cases where prisoners have been wrongfully hanged. This is the strongest defence of all in this situation. You need to find various cases that demonstrate different reasons why the law is flawed when it comes to the death penalty. This could include police corruption, police neglect towards their duties, the changing face of forensic evidence, lack of information. You also need to suggest that once an execution takes place, if it is a mistake, it is one that can never be rectified.
Interesting cases that might be used:
- In March 1950, Timothy Evans was executed for the murder of his wife and child. Sixteen years later, the awful truth came out that Evans wasn’t guilty. Mrs Evans and her daughter had been killed by John Christie who also killed five other women.
- In 1952, Mahmood Hussein Mattan was executed. He was believed to have murdered Lily Volpert. Although an eye witness suggested that it was not Mattan that had done the murder but someone else, this was ignored. When the case was investigated by the Court of Appeal, it was suggested that it was ‘demonstrably flawed’.
- In 1953, Derek Bentley was executed. This was a mentally handicapped young man that couldn’t truly speak for himself. He had been accused of shooting a police officer even though he was in custody at the time of the crime. Ironically, the person that executed the police officer was discovered. However, because of his youth he could not be executed and served only ten years’ imprisonment.
- In 1955, Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain and many would argue that she too should not have been executed. The reason for this is that she murdered her boyfriend, David Blakely. However, and this is an interesting point of law, Blakely had beat her so violently ten days beforehand that she had lost her unborn child. It could be suggested that due to the nature of what happened Ruth Ellis was suffering from diminished responsibility. The only problem was that at that period the legal term ‘diminished responsibility’ did not exist.
- In 1959, George Kelly ended his days due to the hangman’s noose. He had supposedly murdered the manager of a cinema in Liverpool. Strangely enough, irony raises its head again here too. Although another man, Donald Johnson had confessed to the murder, the police forgot to mention this at George Kelly’s trial.
These are just five sample cases that could be used to add weight to your argument. There are many more. The newspaper archives are a very rich source of information concerning murder trials and executions. Always make sure that you make detailed notes of where you got your sources from as it wastes a great deal of time if you find something that is particularly useful and then you can’t find it again.
