Life Or Death

Life or Death

For the longest time the death penalty has been a hot topic surrounded by much controversy. Many people believe the government has no right to take the life of one of its citizens. People say that they are trying to protect life but what they don't realize is they are making it worse. I believe the death penalty should be enforced and people should stop trying to abolish it.

Capital punishment has been around since man first walked the earth, and while the methods have changed the principle has remained the same. Someone has committed such a wicked crime that the only logical punishment would be to put this person to death. People have fought the death penalty for years, but it has yet to be abolished for a few very good reasons.

The death penalty is often a crime deterrent. When people know a crime is punishable by death then their fear of losing

their own life will often keep them from committing such a crime. If the death penalty is attached to certain crimes, then the penalty exerts a positive effect causing the masses to look down on the act and to shun those who would commit such a crime.

Only thirty-five of fifty states have the death penalty. The choices of execution are: hanging, electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, and lethal injection. These vary from state to state. Although not all states have the death penalty experts say that the presence of the death penalty extends to the states without the death penalty giving an implied fear of committing crimes wicked enough to be punished by death.

Executions maximize public safety through a form of incapacitation Incapacitating a person is to deprive of ability, qualification, or strength; make incapable or unfit; disable. Executing a person takes away the capacity of and forcibly prevents any possible recurrence of violence.

Capital punishment offers a since of retribution for many of the more violent crimes; however many people think that the death penalty is much to sever a punishment for any crime, in fact in the case of Furman vs. Georgia rendered on June 29, 1972 the death penalty was declared cruel and unusual punishment and thus violated the 8th amendment of the constitution; thusly no executions took place from 1967 to 1977 where in the supreme court case Gregg vs. Georgia the original ruling was overturned in 1975. The Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment did not violate the 8th amendment and was thusly not in violation of any laws.

Those who object to the death penalty do not see the death penalty as being morally wrong. For them, the most likely source of difficulty it the constitutional difficulty of the 8th amendment prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment," When told by the opposing side that the death penalty is cruel, inhumane and degrading, most supporters argue that murder is too. In fact, some consider execution to be more humane than life imprisonment because it is quick and instantaneous. Those in support of capital punishment feel that making the prisoner suffer by rotting in jail for the rest of his life is more torturous and inhumane than execution. To sum up the basic views of the supporter of capital punishment, imprisonment is simply not a sufficient safeguard against the future actions of criminals because it offers the possibility of escape, and release on parole. "We think that some criminals must be made to pay for their crimes with their lives, and we think that we, the survivors of the world they violated, may legitimately extract that payment because we, too, are their victims" (Bedau).

The economy even benefits from the death penalty. State and Federal prisons are overcrowded. What do these prisons have to do with the American economy? American tax money is used to support hard core criminals like murderers, rapists, etc. that are serving their sentence. At the end of 1992 State and Federal prisons reached a record high of 883,593 prisoners. This record means that approximately 1,143 prison bed spaces are needed per week due to overcrowding. To put this in an economic perspective, the average each prisoner costs $22,000 per year, and the cost of new construction averages almost $54,000 per bed. The 883,593 prisoners are costing the American taxpayers approximately $19.4 billion plus another $61.7 million for the construction of the 1,143 spaces needed. Why should we, the tax payers support these criminals? It's true that not all the prisoners are hard core, but in 1992, 2,575 prisoners, all murderers, were sentenced to death. Thirty-one of the 2,575 murderers had been executed during 1992. This is the largest number of people executed for any year since 1976. By executing these murderers, the American tax money could be used for something more useful. Thus the economy benefits from the death penalty. Plus, it helps lower the prison population by the number executed.

The average time a death row prisoner has to spend in jail until the death sentence is carried out is about nine and one half years. It's more economical to keep them in prison for those nine years and execute them, rather than let them spend their life in jail, taking up space and tax money. Those who argue that it's more expensive to execute a prisoner don't look at the overall picture. Suppose the Amount A equals the amount of money to support one prisoner per year approximately $22,000, and Amount B equals the cost of the execution. We are talking about paying Amount A times the nine years spent in jail plus Amount B for the execution plus the cost for new construction