The Death Penalty: Indefensible!

Why is "capital punishment" (what a farcical euphemism!) still legal in this country when it's been outlawed in virtually every other industrialized nation (and even most non-industrialized nations)?!? Basically, it's a political symbol - supporting the death penalty is a way for politicians to say, "I'm tough on criminals."

Other excuses are often provided, but a little analysis reveals that they hold little weight. Saving money is a common one (as if that's something worth taking a life for!); some claim that incarceration for life is too expensive. But this isn't necessarily so; the legal costs of invoking the death penalty are exorbitant. The money spent on public defenders, district attorneys, judges, court paperwork and segregation of prisoners on death row can easily cover the costs of life imprisonment; Time magazine reported in 1971 that the commutation of death sentences of 15 Arkansas prisoners saved the state an estimated $1.5 million, and The Sacramento Bee estimated that California spent $1 billion on death-row cases between 1977 and 1993, only to execute two people during that period.

The other most common argument is that the death penalty is a more potent crime deterrent. If life in prison without parole isn't enough of a deterrent, do you think that the death penalty will be? Murderers are not rational people who conscientiously consider the consequences of their actions. The claim that the death penalty is more of a deterrent to crime than life imprisonment is hogwash. In 1974, states with the death penalty had an average murder rate of 9.3 per 100,000 population, whereas states without it had an average rate of 5.8. None of the states with the six lowest murder rates had death penalty laws. And over the past few decades dozens of researchers have analyzed crime statistics for evidence that capital punishment affects the crime rate, to no avail. After reviewing some of these studies in 1976, the United State Supreme Court found no conclusive evidence that the death penalty deters violent crime. The United Nations had already come to the same conclusion in their 1968 report Capital Punishment, which noted: "Examination of the number of murders before and after the abolition of the death penalty does not support the theory that capital punishment has a unique deterrent effect. Nowhere has abolition been followed by an otherwise inexplicable rise in the murder rate; nowhere has reintroduction been followed by an otherwise inexplicable decline in the murder rate."

Now, here's my biggest beef about the death penalty - people make mistakes! Because of this, many innocent people have been executed in this country. Two separate studies conducted in 1987 by The Stanford Law Review and Tufts University found that 350 people sentenced to death in this century were later proven innocent, including 23 who were actually executed. Want some examples? Timothy Evans, whose execution in this country sparked outrage in Great Britain and led to the abolition of capital punishment there; Lloyd Eldon Miller, on death row for 11 years in Illinois, found innocent ONE DAY before his scheduled execution; Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, sentenced to the electric chair in Florida in 1963, proven innocent in 1975, after spending 12 years in prison; Randal Dale Adams, who spent 12 years in a Texas prison and James Richardson 25 years in a Florida jail, both on death row for crimes they did not commit, only to be spared (like to Pitts and Lee) by a court-imposed moratorium on executions. Sometimes the government changes its mind: In 1977, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is excessively harsh punishment for the crime of rape - a little late for the 455 men executed for that crime since 1930. As of this writing, 89 people have been released from death row after evidence surfaced exonerating them; how many of the thousands on death row now are innocent as well? And how many will be executed because they ran out of time, or because no DNA was available to prove their innocence?

We do not accept "eye-for-an-eye" punishment as morally acceptable nor effective in our society. We neither have rapists raped, nor do we have the homes of arsonists burned down. We should share the same objections with the punishment of death to to prove that killing is wrong.