Why Capital Punishment is wrong

I've never felt good about the death penalty. For one, I believe that it's hypocritical for a government to kill someone to prove that killing is bad. But there are three main reasons I'd like to expound upon to further detail the argument against the death penalty.

First, people often have a change of heart on death row. The most notable example of this is Stanley "Tookie" Williams, an early leader of the Crips gang, convicted in 1979 in California of the murders of four people during a motel robbery. He was sentenced to death. After fourteen years on death row, all the time maintaining his innocence, Williams began anti-gang activism. He wrote several children's books advocating that the reader stay away from gangs and violence. In 1997, he wrote an apology on his website for his role in the Crips. In 2004, he brokered a peace agreement between two of the country's most violent gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, the latter of which he helped found. Despite his efforts against gangs as well as his maintained innocence, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency the day before his scheduled execution. Williams was executed by lethal injection 13 December 2005. During his execution, the staff had difficulty inserting the needles and the execution took an abnormally long 20 minutes. Though he provided no official final words to the warden, his final words as tape-recorded by his supporters were "Teach them how to avoid our destructive footsteps. Teach them to strive for higher education. Teach them to promote peace and teach them to focus on rebuilding the neighborhoods that you, others, and I helped to destroy." This man, who clearly had a change of heart and ought to have been released from prison was instead barbarically executed by the State of California.

My second argument is based on the lack of certainty in today's judicial system. Given that we can never possibly be 100% certain of a convicted person's guilt, we should not impose an irreversible punishment such as death. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1973, 139 people have been released from death row in the United States after new evidence was found proclaiming their innocence. These are 123 innocent lives that were almost taken away by a government that was incorrect in its assessment of guilt. Who knows if we've executed an innocent individual? The fact that that's even a possibility, that the state's conviction could possibly be incorrect, should take off the table all irreversible punishment. While time spent in incarceration can't possibly be given back, monetary compensation to the individual can be made. The state can take away someone's life, but they certainly don't have the power to give it back in case of an incorrect verdict.

Thirdly and finally, the death penalty simply costs more than life imprisonment. Multiple states' systems show this fact. In California, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, the yearly difference between imprisoning an inmate on death row and imprisoning an inmate in a maximum-security prison is $90,000 per inmate per year. Using conservative estimates, the Commission on the Fair Adminstration of Justice it cites estimates that California spends $137 million per year on their death penalty system. The same study estimates that if California were to impose a maximum penalty of a life sentence is only $11.5 million per year. Why the big decrease? Appeals. Those sentenced to death (with the rare exception of crazies like Gary Gilmore) will inevitably appeal their conviction to the highest court allowed. The state will be forced to pay the cost of defending their conviction, a high price given that most death penalty appeals last upwards of ten years.

Clearly, as shown by the evidence above, the death penalty is not an appropriate means of punishment. Its finality and high cost clearly show the pragmatic reasoning behind opposition, but cases like Tookie Williams' make one consider if the death penalty is fair in all cases. This is an important issue; we should all be moved to action to support the elimination of the death penalty as a means of legal punishment in our society.

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