A hefty amount of peoples tax dollars are being spend on capital cases, probably more than most people would think. Between 1982-1997 the extra cost of capital trials was 1.6 billion dollars (frontiernet.net), stop and think of how you alone could spend this money to better our country, or the world even. Its not to say that there should be no punishment for people who commit crimes “worthy” of the death penalty, but the death penalty costs over 38% more money than life without parole. For example: in Los Angeles, CA, the total cost of a capital trial as opposed to a regular trial is over a million-dollar difference. Roughly the cost of a capital case is over $1,898,323 and a regular case is around $627,320 considering the cost of a defense attorney, a prosecution attorney, the investigation, court time, and jail time (amnesty.org). The Connecticut chief state attorney John M. Bailey looks at it this way, "Every dollar we spend on a capital case is a dollar we can't spend anywhere else.... We have to let the public know what it costs [to pursue a capital case.]". Life without parole has its advantages and its disadvantages, as most things do, however in this case the advantages are more beneficial than worrying about the few disadvantages. Being sentenced to life means that there is no chance an innocent person is being killed for no apparent reason. Still the person may be held in prison for a while, at least when they are found innocent they can try and go back to the life they had before. Killing an innocent person is more than just the fact that the person didn’t do anything to deserve the crime, but that now all people associated with that person are going to be affected by the flaws of the death penalty and many lives have the potential to be ruined. Author of the book Toward a New Modernism, Kenneth Cauthen says “Life imprisonment without parole serves the same purposes as capital punishment at less cost without the practical disadvantages and injustices of its actual practice”. The cost of the death penalty is most definitely not worth the outcome. Counties manage the high costs of the death penalty by decreasing funding for highways, police, and firefighters and by increasing taxes. Aside from the financial aspects of a capital trial, the amount of time taken out of peoples lives is also a reason capital punishment is a terrible method of trying to reduce crime.
The death penalty moreover is a waste of time, being a capital trial, time spent in the courtroom greatly increases as the case must be heard thoroughly. People can be completely innocent and have to plead their way all through a capital case, be put on death row or even executed before they are proven innocent just because people can tell good lies. A young teenager, Ryan Mathews is spending his young years pleading his innocence in court against convictions of murdering a white convenience store owner. When a trial started early in the morning, the state presented evidence all day until 10 pm where the defense moved to rest but were forced to stay and give their argument. After asking for another rest at approximately 4:30 am, the judge refused and forced the jurors to deliberate and reach a verdict. The jury returned and told the judge they could not reach a verdict, the judge ordered the jury to continue until they had reached their verdict. About 40 minutes later, after 16 hours of working all day, the jurors exhaustedly found Ryan guilty of first-degree murder. Ryan has since been proven innocent when DNA samples showed that he was not at the scene of the crime, and that the car he allegedly jumped into, was incapable of being used in the manner specified by the witness (nodeathpenalty.org). That is just one case of how capital punishment has showed to be pointless and an inappropriate invasion on an innocent persons life, labeling them as a criminal. This next case is an example of just how severely capital punishment can ruin the lives of the innocent.
The Death Row 10 is a group of ten men who were convicted and sentenced to death for “confessions” they made while being interrogated. Jon Burge and his fellow officers used brutal means to get these men and a couple others on to death row for crimes they didn’t commit by torturing them into confession. Burge and his men used electric shocks, suffocation hoods, Russian roulette, burns, beatings, and threats of death to force false confessions out of several men. For one of these men, Aaron Patterson, the nightmare started in 1986. Aaron spent over 13 years on death row pleading his innocence after being tortured into a false confession. Aaron had everyone against him, the judge had made racist remarks in the past and refused Aaron’s defense to present evidence that he was tortured. The judge also refused to allow a DNA test for a different member of the Death Row 10 who was later exonerated from death row by evidence presented by individual DNA testing (nodeathpenalty.org). Burge was fired in 1993 for torturing suspects, he received full pension and retired to Florida. After Burge was fired, State attorney Richard Devine offered Aaron a deal, which would get him off of death row and out of prison if he dropped the claims of torture and admitted being guilty. Aaron refused the deal and said, "I’m going to stay until we get this done right…I’m pretty much certain they know now I didn’t do it, but they’re trying to wiggle their way out of it"(Chicago Tribune). Devine is trying to sweep the issue of police torture under the rug, and the Death Row Ten will not give up until justice is served.
The death penalty has certainly proved itself to be unjust, not cost effective at all and a process that is very inefficient. People like Burge have manipulated capital punishment in order to “earn” a career and make things better for themselves, and the whole time there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Out of the 69 countries in the world which have to date abolished the death penalty for all crimes, at least 38 have prohibited it in their constitutions, often on human rights grounds (amnesty.org). Capital punishment is not serving its purpose to deter crime, and more than three countries a year on average have realized this. When will the rest of the world realize how much controversy and heartache the death penalty is causing, when there is a severely better alternative? Abolishing the death penalty is one more step that needs to be taken if we want to live in a fair world.
