Members of the jury I come before you today in hope of persuading you to remove the ultimate denial of human rights, the death penalty.

For those of you who answered no and said sure I would condemn the accused to death, may I ask you don’t you feel like a hypocrite? You are killing someone because they killed someone. The whole eye for an eye notion of justice displayed by the death penalty is hypocritical and is so unjust that it isn’t used anywhere else in the entire legal system. Surely justice can be served through different means.

Now to those of you who remain who still don’t share my view, who answered no to both of my questions, I now wish to impress upon you how the death penalty is a burden on everyone else, not just you.

It is a burden on the government as it costs more to kill someone than it does to imprison them. It costs between two and three million dollars on average to execute someone, the same cost for imprisoning someone for forty years. Surely life imprisonment would be a less inhumane and less expensive way for justice to be served.

The death penalty is also a burden on the families of the offenders. Surely the family would rather the offender is kept in jail, instead of being taken from them. The knowledge that their son or daughter, brother or sister is still alive somewhere would surely be less stressful than having to come to terms with them being gone forever.

And finally the death penalty is a burden on the accused themselves. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking “well Duh!” but think about all the innocent people who have been convicted and executed. Contrary to what’s on CSI, once someone has been sentenced to death, not matter what new evidence arises they are still going to be killed. And I know that retentionists will say “But the death penalty has a clause that states that all legal options have to be exhausted before the accused can be executed and that no one can be wrongly executed.” But tell that to the family’s o the twenty three people who have been wrongly executed. There justice has clearly not been served.

Retentionists may also state that the death penalty is a deterrent but according to recent statistics the death penalty has no effect on crime whatsoever. The United Kingdoms Royal Commission stated that “there is no clear evidence that the abolition of the death penalty has led to an increase in crime, or that its reintroduction has led to a fall.”  Recent statistics showed that the abolition of the death penalty has actually led to a fall in crime. In Canada the homicide rate of 3.09 in 1975 has dropped to 1.76 after the abolition of the death penalty. This is a forty four point seven percent drop in homicides. This clearly acknowledges that the death penalty is not a deterrent.

Retentionists may also state that the death penalty provides incapacitation of criminals and prevents them from re offending. But surely life imprisonment achieves this in a less inhumane way.

The main objective of any punishment is to serve justice. Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher stated that “Justice is a form of correct or proper action.” The death penalty is neither correct nor proper, and you the jury have a duty to see that the death penalty is abolished, and that justice is served.