Death Penalty

Throughout the history of criminal punishment the death penalty has always been a major topic of interest. In America today the death penalty remains one of the top issues of concern. Are you for the death penalty or against it? That is the big question just like the discussion of abortion it is definitely a hot issue. In this paper I will proceed to tell you why I am against the death penalty.

There are many reasons to be against the death penalty. The first I feel an economically important issue for our struggling American economy is that it usually costs us more to kill a person through executions then it does to sentence a person to life in prison. It costs on an average of 2 million dollars to execute a person and roughly 500,000 to keep them in jail for life. That four times more then keeping them in prison. Also more prisons are being built all over the country so there will be room for the few of the inmates who would actually be executed.

Maybe the most important of all is that the innocent could be wrongfully put to death. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 82 inmates have been freed from death row. That's 1 death row inmate found to be wrongfully convicted for every 7 executed. So how many of those who were actually executed were really guilty? Death is a pretty serious thing to be getting wrong.

Many people think that if you kill someone for a certain crime that others will not commit that knowing what the consequences will be. But the death penalty is not a deterrent. Crime rates have not gone down. The murder rate in the United States is six times that of Britain and five times that of Australia. Neither Britain or Australia have the death penalty. Texas has twice the murder rate of Wisconsin, a state that doesn't have the death penalty. Texas and Oklahoma have historically executed the most number of death row inmates. But, in 2003 their state murder rates increased, and both states have murder rates higher than the national average.

Death row is also not getting any less crowded. There are more then 3,200 inmates on death row in the United States. Thirty-eight states perform the death penalty with California having the most death row inmates with 635. The average length of time spent on death