Capital Punishment In The USA.......

As I posted earlier, I do not believe in the use of the death penalty by the state. My two core concerns on this issue are that first, the state should not be involved in the taking of life whenever practical. This cannot be a hard-and-fast rule, since the state is also charged with national defense and that entails the taking of life when warranted. The other is that the state is not infallible in the process of judging people and the criminal justice system may make mistakes by unjustly put innocents to death.

Some of the key issues....

Cost of keeping an inmate in jail vs. execution- Some people argue that it costs more to keep an inmate in jail for life than it is to execute.

According to Richard Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., the most comprehensive cost study was published by Duke University researchers in 1993. This two-year study determined North Carolina's capital cases cost at least an extra $2.16 million per execution, compared to what taxpayers would have spent if defendants were tried without the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison.

Actual data and studies concludes that it costs much more to seek the death penalty and then execute a prisoner than to try to convict for life imprisonment. One of the reasons is that capital punishment trials where the death penalty is sought tend to be much more expensive and time consuming than those that seek life imprisonment. Additionally, only 10% of those cases result in an actual conviction with a death penalty thus the additional costs for the 90% of the trials that fail to convict could have been avoided by seeking a life imprisonment term. Some more reading here. So the additional cost per death row inmate given the aggregate costs of capital punishment trials and since these inmates spend on average over 10 years incarcerated anyway, the present value of the cost of execution versus life imprisonment leads to the conclusion that cost is not and should not be a factor in deciding upon performing executions.

Deterrent-Some argue that by having a death penalty, there is a deterrent effect on crimes that may result in the death penalty. Most crimes punishable by the death penalty involve homicide. But when comparing homicide rates between those states with and without the death penalty, the data appears to not support this conclusion.

Keith Harries and Derral Cheatwood studied differences in homicides and violent crime in 293 pairs of counties. Counties were matched in pairs based on geographic location, regional context, historical development, demographic and economic variables. The pairs shared a contiguous border, but differed on use of capital punishment. The authors found no support for a deterrent effect of capital punishment at the county level comparing matched counties inside and outside states with capital punishment, with and without a death row population, and with and without executions. The authors did find higher violent crime rates in death penalty counties.

Murder rates in states with the death penalty are still higher than those states without. Additionally, the gap in murder rates has actually widened where the overall decline in homicide in states without the death penalty has declined more than those with the executions.

Retribution and revenge-This is the emotional response towards punishing the guilty of crimes, sometimes outrageous and heinous ones. In order to justify revenge, there has to be an absolute assurance that the convicted and executed criminal is certainly guilty of the crime as charged. If a state puts an inmate to death for a crime in which the prisoner is subsequently exonerated, then the state is guilty of excesses in which I do not think that they are entitled to.

So these are my reasons for being against the death penalty. There is no justification on economic grounds, it does not appear to be an effective deterrent and the state, in my opinion, should not be involved in the taking of life wherever practical.