Only Vengeance Or The Accurate Penalty: The Death Penalty

Only Vengeance or the Accurate Penalty: The Death Penalty

The death penalty is a highly debated topic that arises many times in today's society. The debate of capital punishment's morality may never be settled but various opinions have been formed on it. Some opinions are formed from sheer belief and those people do not know the true facts about the death penalty. In this paper, you will observe the true facts, the ones that are out there for reviewing, but highly overlooked.

Before you go on, I would like to define a few terms that will be found through out this paper. First and foremost, is the term capital punishment, which is the punishment of death for a very serious felony. A synonym for this word that is also commonly found throughout this work is the death penalty. Life without parole is when you spend the remainder of your existence in jail, and no bail or way to get out will be compromised. Arbitrariness is a decision made by individual belief and not on well thought analysis, or truth. Appeals are pleas and cases presented to the judges from lawyers that show evidence of innocence so as to get their client off of death row.

First to be examined here will be the costs of the death penalty. Highly brought up in debate on the matter, it is believed that keeping someone in jail will cost more than to just kill them. Costs of the death penalty are actually quite high and rage from about 2 to 3 times more than actually keeping them in jail for the remainder of their life. When having to take into consideration that capital punishment comes with the price of the drugs used to kill, the trials, the time had to spend in jail while waiting for the jurisdiction and the date with the prisoner's end, and the many appeals that make there way endlessly to the court room, the prices get skyrocketing.

The following argument will present the question of how fair is the death penalty. Evidence of arbitrariness from the jurors will be brought to a new light, and now the true agenda of some people on the jury revealed. The horrible act of racism will come into play as well. Believe it or not racism can be shown in a house of law, and those victims who are white are sought out more justice than other races. This is a horrible accusation, but it is a very true one that can not be overlooked.

The last card played in this paper will be the Constitution. It brings about a strong argument of cruel and unusual punishment. A right guaranteed to us meaning that no punishments that are harsh and strange shall be distributed to any individual. Now in giving the death penalty are we really going against an assured right?

Capital punishment is used to kill all capital crime offenders. How humane is this method of punishment? It has never been civilized to kill a man, so what is the justification in killing a man who killed a man? Wouldn't that be proving that killing those convicted of murder is just as unjustified as those who have killed someone? Also, what is the guilty learning from this? How are these prisoners supposed to try and clean up their acts as others do without the chance to live?

Is it Too Costly?

One of the main issues brought up when debating the death penalty are its expenses. Many debaters who are supportive of the death penalty speculate that the death penalty costs less than having the defendant live in jail without parole. This is a very strong argument. The reasoning behind that is who would really like to spend more money rather than save it? They see this as less money they will lose and an issue that can be used to win, but they are highly mistaking.

Tax burdened citizens don't want to spend a lot of money on keeping prisoners alive when they can be easily killed. This, however, is not true. These people do not know the truth about how much killing is really costing them. With the money spent on capital punishment you could pay for a couple extra deputies. Costs for the death penalty differ between states but the range of prices is roughly between $1.6 million and $3.2 million.

"Capital cases burden county budgets with large unexpected costs", according to a report released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, The Budgetary Repercussions of Capital Convictions, by Katherine Baicker. "Counties manage these high costs by decreasing funding for highways and police and by increasing taxes. The report estimates that from 1982-1997 the extra cost of capital trials was $1.6 billion." With this amount of money instead of killing off prisoners we could improve our state's economy or add money to budgets that are very low. Without the death penalty taxes could be reduced, and funding for police and highways could be once again increased.

In the book of research by Mark Costanzo, P.H.D. he examined the costs of using capital punishment and life without parole here are those costs. "... The total cost of Life Without Parole ranges from $750,000 to $1.1 million per prisoner." This cost may vary if the person works while imprisoned. Capital punishment has different pricings depending on which state you look at. "In Florida the average cost is $3.2 million per-execution...In California, capital trials are six times more expensive than other murder trials...Yet, even in Texas each capital case costs taxpayers an average of $2.3 million dollars, nearly three times the cost of imprisonment in a maximum-security cell for forty years."

Capital Punishment- Is the Death Penalty Fairly Given

Arbitrariness is a very troublesome problem with capital punishment. There is no way that it can be made perfect because this problem is made visible by many different factors. Race is key in this decision made prior to trial. There are still people in this country who are very racist. Racism plagues society because if you don not see someone of a different color as your equal then when giving them trial your prejudices will become unleashed.

Not only does racism take play, but race-of-victim or race-of-defendant bias or even both. Following is a chart from Richard C. Dieter; Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center entitled the Races of Victims in Death Penalty Cases:

As this pie graph displays more than half of the death penalty cases involve white victims and only small percentages are Black, Hispanic, or Asian. As the chart says 50% of murder victims are white, so what about that other 50%. That extra 50% is made up of minorities. Yet, the research shows only 19% of capital cases involve a victim who is of the minority. Is it really just that coincidental?

Think about that. What is happening to all those other murders? Why are they being so overlooked?