Several different types of material can be used in an introduction:
- A story or anecdote that illustrates the problem. Be sure that you do not offer your story as proof. It is not proof, it is merely an illustration of a problem.
- An interesting quotation or fact that encourages readers to consider the problem.
- A question
- A strongly stated opinion
Below, I offer several different introductions for the model paper on the death penalty.
A story or anecdote:
In 1963, Freddie Lee Pitts and Wilbert Lee, two Florida men, were convicted of the brutal murder of a convenience store clerk and sentenced to death. They spent nine years on death row, avoiding execution because the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty as it was then applied was cruel and unusual punishment. They were resentenced to life. In 1975, they were exonerated after another man confessed to the crime. Ted Bundy was also sentenced to death in Florida. He had escaped from a Colorado jail where he was awaiting trial for murder and had traveled to Florida, where he killed two female college students asleep in their sorority house. Later, he kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl from her middle school, raped her, and murdered her. While he was on death row, prison guards did a routine search of his cell and discovered that he had managed to saw through the bars of his cell window, gluing them back together with a mixture of soap and dust. If he had managed to escape, he almost certainly would have killed again. These two cases illustrate the difficulty in deciding whether or not to apply the death penalty. Society risks either executing innocent prisoners or allowing dangerous prisoners to live and possibly harm others. However, prison security has improved greatly since Ted Bundy's time: no one has ever escaped from a supermax prison (Smith 21). Therefore, the risk of executing an innocent man outweighs the advantages of the death penalty.
Quotation or fact:
Since DNA evidence became available, 120 prisoners (at last count) who have been sentenced to death have been exonerated and freed because of this new technology. All were innocent. All were nearly killed by the state for crimes they did not commit.
Question:
If your nine-year-old honor student had been kidnapped while on the way home from the bus stop, raped, and then beheaded, would you oppose the death penalty? This scenario is not a hypothetical one: it happened to Jimmy Ryce. The guilty man not only took a child's life, he devastated the family: Jimmy's older sister, who was eighteen at the time, felt so guilty about not protecting her little brother that she fell into a deep depression and later committed suicide. Thus, the parents lost two children because of this murder.
Strong statement of opinion:
a. Life is sacred and must be protected. For this reason, the death penalty is necessary to a civilized, functioning society. It is society's way of saying that some crimes are so heinous and such an affront to the value of life that the death penalty is not only allowable but necessary.
b. The death penalty has always been unequally applied. The case of Karla Faye Tucker, a white, Christian, articulate, attractive female who was executed by the state of Texas is an anomaly that highlights the true nature of this punishment. If Tucker had been male, African-American, Muslim, inarticulate, and unattractive, the execution would have garnered almost no notice from the general public. Those sentenced to death are disproportionately likely to be poor, African-American, and male. Furthermore, these inmates almost never receive the avalanche of sympathetic publicity that Tucker received. These disparities make the death penalty unjust.