Capital punishment in the United States has been a controversial issue sparking many heated debates. The death sentence has been put in use for armed robbery, kidnapping, rape, and treason however since the beginning of the nineteenth century executions have been mostly used for murderers. Whether you oppose or support capital punishment, there must be legitimate reasons to back up your beliefs because each side of the controversy has exceptional points. Many disagree with capital punishment because they consider it cruel and there is a risk of executing mistakenly convicted people. Those who agree with capital punishment believe people who take away a human life deserve death through execution. These people also believe that the threat of capital punishment towards criminals will decrease the percentage of crime. Both sides of the issue have great points however one side of the dispute has several ideas which would improve the overall well-being of society. My position on this issue is that capital punishment should be banned due to inequality in the government. Several reasons why capital punishment should be banned are it disregards the possibility of incorrectly claiming innocent lives, costs a lot of money for the government, and it is not a deterrent to criminals.
The government is made up of human beings which means they too can make mistakes. In recent history, we can see examples of many wrongful convictions. Some of these wrongful convictions include Ray Krone in Arizona who was released in 2002. Krone spend 10 years in an Arizona prison some of which included death row for a murder he didn't commit. DNA testing proved his innocence. Another case shows Madison Hobley, Aaron Patterson, Stanley Howard, and LeRoy Orange who were pardoned in 2003. They were sent to death row based on "confessions" through torture. After the fact, Governor George Ryan of Illinois set the other 167 death sentences to life in prison saying " I can not support a system which, in its administration, has proven so fraught with error and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state's taking of innocent life. . ." Jonathon Hoffman of North Carolina was found innocent in 2007 after he was sentenced to death in 1995 due to a murder. He was wrongly convicted because the prosecutors key witness, Johnell Porter, disclosed wrong information about his cousin in order to get back at his cousin for stealing money from him. In each of these cases the ending is reassuring since the innocent prisoner is saved however when prisoners are executed, no legal forum exists in which unanswered questions about their guilt can be resolved. Putting someone under capital punishment is extremely serious business and so when one is convicted one should be convicted based on true evidence. Factors which may hinder the process of wrongfully convicting an innocent citizen are inadequate legal representation, police misconduct, racial prejudice, mistaken eyewitness testimony/ jailhouse snitch to better her/his self, and pressure to solve a case towards a prosecutor.
Abolishing capital punishment would be beneficial to taxpayers because it is more expensive than life in prison. The only way to make the death penalty better source than life in prison is to weaken due process and reducing appellate review which are the only protection against mistakes of the justice system. The savings in dollars would be the cost of justice. The estimated cost of a death penalty case compared to a non-death penalty case is 70% more (1.26 million compared to 740, 000). The greatest costs associated with capital punishment occur before and during the trail not after conviction proceedings. Even if appeals were gone death penalty would still be more expensive then other alternatives.Joint Legislative Budget Committee of the California Legislature said, "Elimination of the death penalty would result in a net savings to the state of at least several tens of millions of dollars annually, and a net savings to local governments in the millions to tens of millions of dollars on a statewide basis." Spending more money on executing criminals means reducing resources for crime prevention, mental health treatment, drug treatment programs, and many other things. This also means we can spend the extra money on more important governmental factors such as safety, health care, and foreign issuesMost people may think that capital punishment is a deterrent but in reality it's not. Capital punishment is not consistently used whenever there is a murder therefore criminals are not deterred. Only a small number of first-degree murderers are sentenced and even fewer are executed. Most killers believe they are too clever to get caught. The threat of execution at some future date is unlikely to enter the minds of those acting under the influence of drugs/ alcohol, grip of fear/rage, panicking while committing other crimes, or those who suffer from mental illness. The murder rate in non-death penalty states has remained consistently lower than the rate in states with the death penalty. Eleven out of the twelve states without capital punishment had homicide rates below the national average. In 1998 research study conducted for the UN concluded "This research has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment. . ."
Those who are pro capital punishment say that racism and the death penalty are fair towards people of other races, classes, or mental abilities. They believe these factors are not an issue and murder has no color, class, or IQ. To support their theory they say that in a 1991 Rand Corporation study by Stephen Klein found murderers receIved the death penalty slightly more often (32%) than non-wite murderers (27%). Even though the study found this, they also found when controlled for variables such as severity and number of crimes committed there is no difference between those sentenced to death for killing white or black victims. However, since 1977 the overwhelming majority of death row defendants have been executed for killing white victims, although African Americans make up half of all homicide victims. A study in 2003 by University of Maryland concluded that race and geography are major factors in death penalty decisions-prosecutor more likely to seek death sentence when victim is white and less likely to seek death sentence when victim is black. Senator Russ Feingold on January 2003 said, "We simply cannot say we live in a country that offers equal justice to all Americans when racial disparities plague the system by which our society imposes the ultimate punishment.
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