Capital punishment, known also as the death penalty, is a subject that is been present in human history for a long time and remains today. Throughout the years' many people have been arguing about whether if it should be completely abolished, why should be abolished, or why should not, either in the United States or other countries around the world, and the answer for that is complete yes.
There are many reasons why the death penalty should not be allowed, and one of them, to start with the argument, is because innocent people are getting killed without further investigation. For many years we have seen cases in the United States where the man who has been accused of murder or either of other things ends up being innocent after having spent a lifetime in prison. As humans we make mistakes, but there are some mistakes from where we cannot recover on which is losing ‘time’ and when your life is being taken away for man mistake. One example of this is the case of Kwame, his brother, and friend of his friend Ricky Jackson, who were found guilty for killing a man in Cleveland back in 1975 for lack of investigation when they were not after 40 years: “Jackson’s sentence was commuted to life a year earlier because of an error in the jury instructions” (The Washington Times/ Mark Gillespie, p.7). This is a clear example of how dangerous the death penalty can be without further investigation, which can also destroy in one instant someone’s life. In addition to this, according to ‘It’s All Politics’ by Danielle Kurtz Leben, “153 death row inmates have been exonerated”. This is a big number of victims that throughout the years have spent a lot of time in prison and have been exonerated of the death penalty because the information provided at first was not reliable.
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Another reason why the death penalty should be abolished is due to the fact is too expansive and it could help the country to save a lot of money. The United States spends a lot of money from taxes in order to kill a prisoner sentenced to the death penalty, which is 10 times more expensive than keeping it alive in prison. As reported by Philip J. Cook, “North Carolina could save $11 million per year by abolishing its death penalty”. This $11 million dollar can be used for school education, disability people, public hospital, public transportation, and more, instead of wasting this amount of money in a not reliable system. Not only that, but also, as mentioned previously, keeping the prisoners for life in prison could be the way to help the country economy to save a lot of money and even grow. Many people argue that putting the prisoner in jail can be more expensive because the government has to provide that person with food, water, to keep himself/her clean, and also a place to live on, either if it’s for a lifetime or for a period of time, but this is not true. Here is a note from Las Vegas Sun which tells us how much money is spend in retaining the prisoner than killing it: “From a suspect’s arrest through his or her final days behind bars, officials spend at least $1.3 million on murder cases where convicts are sentenced to death but not executed that’s $532,000 more compared with murder cases where capital punishment wasn't sought” (Las Vegas Sun/ Ana Ley, p.5).
Another equally important reason why the death penalty should be abolished is that the system is not and hasn’t improved its methods throughout the years and it could be easily manipulated for someone’s advantage as a matter of fact. There had been more than two cases in the United States where the person who is been put to death takes longer than what it should as a result of suffering and agony before the prisoner dies. According to David Von Drehle from the Times, “In April 2014, Oklahoma authorities spent some 40 minutes trying to kill Clayton Lockett before he finally died of a heart attack”. Again, here is another example of negligence by the government and authorities who demonstrate how unprepared some of this death penalty movements can be. How it is that they spend around $532,000 in the death penalty when their methods are not getting better and what they’re doing is nothing than just torturing someone. On the other hand, the death penalty system it’s been manipulated in most of the cases back in the days in order to close a case or also to put an innocent to death just because they wanted to change somethings in the system for their own good. This is a good example of how weak the system had been back in the day and how it projects for the future to come. Also, it projects to us how careless they are in terms of evaluating its police officers, which give makes us doubt of today’s protocols. This quote by James Dawson examines the corruption of some of the cases back in the time and how police officers were able to remove or even add some evidence in order to find someone guilty and send it to jail. “Most of an elite team of forensic hair examiners had lied at trial in the 1980s and 1990s to benefit prosecutors in 32 death penalty cases. 14 of those people have since died in prison or have been executed” (Delaware Public Media/ James Dawson, p.3). As explained by James Dawson, fourteen of the people who were incarcerated wrongly had to spend the rest of their life in prison, and many had been killed, even know most of them were innocents. This is sad because these prisoners didn’t have someone to go over their case in order to prevent authorities from doing this and free them from something they never committed on their life.
There is a good amount of people who believe that the death penalty should be allowed because it has helped families to get justice throughout the years. However, this is true that instead of death penalty justice for families, we can elaborate justice throughout different methods. There are methods that can be more convenient for the country, as well as for the families who are suffering while they wait for their murder to be killed. This is something that can be described as something indescribable. Instead of the death penalty, prisoners should work for free in order to earn their food and give back to the country. For families, this cannot be enough justice, but it is more considerable to put the prisoner to work for the country than just being killed. The 13th Amendment, which otherwise banned slavery, expressly allowed the practice to continue for prisoners. In other words, we can still make prisoners work for free without turning this into slavery, helping the country to grow economically and keeping them doing something while they are in prison. Moreover, this can also be used as punishment for the bad things they’ve done and given back to the nation for the damages they caused as well. Prisoners could be fixing streets as they used to do back in the day, cleaning parks, in construction, and more. This is because killing them or keeping them in prison can be expansive and somehow, they need to earn their food, water, and the supplies they use while they are in jail, which actually comes from the government taxes. Here we can see how ABC NEWS makes mention of this economic situation as we still running the death penalty: “It is cheaper to imprison killers for life than to execute them” (ABC NEWS, p.2).
In relation to the things mentioned before, there is another statement against allowing the death penalty that it’s been circulating; this one states that the death penalty is delivered randomly and that it has to do with racial identity, in other words ‘racism’. When we talk about to abolish the death penalty this is something that we as humans’ beings have to pay close attention to. As I mentioned before, death penalty system can be easily shape on advantage of the person who is investigating the case, which means that if there a case that involucrate racial problems, such as a black men killed a white police officer, without further proof this person could be easily sent to jail and be sentenced later on to death penalty. Lincoln Kaplan, agreeing with the New York Times, explains that “black defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death if their victim is white rather than black” (p.2). In this quote by Lincoln Caplan, we can see racism still present among authorities, which gives the sense that white people even know are guilty, for social inequality had been getting priority over the black people, whether to not or be executed, while this is under ‘investigation’. Many families all over the country are now afraid about this random decision because they don’t know if one of their family members who also are in jail can be condemned to death. This makes the families wonder if this is based on identity or instead if it’s about who is actually guilty which puts so much pressure over the families of those who are in jail and their sentence is not done yet. Another quote from HUFFPOST by Laura Bassett states: “A national poll conducted in 2010 by Lake Research Partners showed that the unfairness of death sentencing is a top concern among voters who oppose capital punishment” (p.6). This confusion can lead to future problems as time goes by.
After having investigated and analyzed all this information about whether if the death penalty should be abolished or not, I have concluded that it should. This is because the death penalty cost too much money and which is been taken from citizen's taxes while they are in prison waiting to be condemned death. In addition to this, the death penalty still doesn’t have reliable methods that we can depend on, bringing with innocent people put it to death and corruption in most of the cases.
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