The Death Penelty Essay, Research Paper

The death penelty is an innoficiant way of upholding the law. It is slow, costly, and does not detter people from commiting crimes. It is responsible for the death of innocent people and it does not provide closure for the family of the muredered. The death penelty should be abolished, it is useless and expensive.

The death penelty is not a detterant. This year the New York Times did a survey that showed ten out of the twelve states that don’t have the death penelty have homicide rates that are lower than the national average (6.3), and half of the states that do have the death penelty are above the national average. The survey also showed that during the last twenty years, the homicide rate in the states with the death penelty have been 48% – 101% higher than than in the states without the death penelty. Further more in 1994, the death row population nationwide exceeded three-thousand, and out of all of them only thirty-one were executed. America executes approximatley one in every twenty inmates sentenced to death. Vicious killers who commited crimes in the 1970’s and the early 1980’s are still alive on death row. Most people sentenced to death end up dying of old age. What kind of deterent does the death penelty provide if you actually don’t die when your sentenced to death.

There is always the possibility that the person accused is innocent. Putting a person to death then relizing he was innocent, how does the state apologize to the family. Now he is dead and the state or the government should be considered a murderer. There is no garentee that the accused is at fault, people make mistakes all the time. That is an important factor that needs to be taken into account, an innocent man could be killed.

The people of America are concerned about getting rid of programs that are high in cost, one of the most costley is the death penelty. Florida spends 3.2 million on each death row inmate, as apposed to five hundred and thirty-five thousand on an average of forty years in prison for a life sentence. “Every cost study undertaken has found that it is far more expensive, because of legal safeguards, to carry out the death penelty than it is to jail a killer for life.” If only one out of every twenty people sentenced to death are excecuted, just think if those other nineteen were sentenced to life than it would save millions of dollers. Considering that there are criminals that have been on death row for over twenty years they might as well have been sentenced for life and saved the people millions in taxes.

The victims are dead,and no execution is going to make them alive. As cold hearted as that may sound,its true. The death penelty may provide clousure for the victims family, but if it is a form of clousure what kind of explanasion is givin if the accused lives longer on death row than some of the victims family. If a person kills someone and is sentenced to death, killing them is no resolution. This only makes the family of the executed just as unhappy as the family of the victims, why make more people miserable. An eye for an eye isn’t a just argument, because two wrongs will naver make a right.

“with an execution, everyone is a victim. I never believed that crap about closure.”

-Larry Fitzgerald, spokesman for Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to the Dallas Observer, July 29, 2000