Is the death penalty an effective crime deterrent?

No

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by Skye Martin

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"If the USA's capital justice system were a private company, it would have been shut down long ago. After three decades, this is an enterprise showing no measurable benefit for society, despite an investment of billions of dollars."
Amnesty International

Every crime is destructive to the social and moral fabric of society. In our society, we have punishment, but punishment was never meant to undo the harm caused by a crime. Rather, it was meant to fulfill a social function of justice in an attempt to ensure the greater interest of society.

There is a form of punishment - capital punishment - which does not contribute to this end. It very often creates more injustices and it does not function for the greater interest of society; in fact, it may be argued that it produces the exact opposite effect. And it may be argued that capital punishment is a threat to the liberties of all.

1. Capital Punishment Does Not Repair Hurt

Justice for murder victims and closure for families are often thought as key reasons to promote capital punishment. However, many people, including victims, believe that more killing will not bring closure and that capital punishment is equally as damaging to victims. Vicki Schieber is the mother of Shannon Schieber who was murdered in Philadelphia while attending graduate school. The killer was not arrested until 2002 and is now serving multiple life sentences for killing the 23-year-old. She gave her plea to the Murder Victims' Families For Human Rights:

"Losing a beloved family member to murder is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. There is no such thing as closure when a violent crime rips away the life of someone dear to you. We believe that one tragedy of the death penalty is that it turns society's perspective away from the victim and creates an outpouring of support for those who have perpetuated a crime (http://www.mvfhr.or g/)."

2. Capital Punishment Hurts More Than It Helps

Robert Meeropol was the son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The U.S. Government executed them in 1953. Robert was only three years old when his parents were arrested and six years old when they were executed for "conspiring to steal the secret of the atom bomb." An attorney and long-time activist, Robert has since founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children in 1990 to provide support to children of parents who have been harassed, jailed or otherwise targeted for their progressive beliefs. Robert expresses some interesting thoughts about the results of capital punishment:

"As far as I know, no one has studied how the execution of an immediate family member impacts children. We don't even know how many children have an immediate family member on death row in the United States today. Worse, we don't know the effect that having a parent executed has upon their impressionable lives and the cost society may pay for that impact (www.rfc.org)."

Pam Crawford's brother, Ed Horsley, was executed in 1996 after being convicted of the murder of Naomi Rolon. Ed was 16 at the time of his arrest:

"My granddaughter was 8 years old at the time of the execution and is still struggling with it to this day. She would always ask, If it's wrong to kill somebody, which it is, then how is it right for the state to kill uncle Ed?' (http://www.mvfhr.or g/)"

3.Capital Punishment Creates More Injustices

Since 1976, more than 100 prisoners convicted of barbaric crimes and sentenced to death were exonerated with convincing evidence to their innocence. Wrongful convictions are often the result of false confessions, mistaken eyewitness evidence and junk science, also known as forensic misconduct. Nearly half of these cases included more than one reason for a wrongful conviction.

In 2001, the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law School analyzed the cases of 86 death row exonerates. They found, and further elaborated upon, a number of reasons why innocence people are handed over to capital punishment (Center for Wrongful Convictions 2007):

A. Eyewitness error
Eyewitness misidentification is the most common cause of wrongful convictions in the United States, playing a role in 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.

B. Government misconduct
Most law enforcement officers and prosecutors are honest. However, criminal justice is a human effort and the opportunity for dishonesty exists. DNA exonerations have uncovered official misconduct at every level of an investigation. This misconduct has included:
Deliberate suggestiveness in identification procedures
The withholding of evidence from defense
The deliberate mishandling, mistreatment or destruction of evidence
The use of unreliable government informants
(From The Innocence Project, 2007)

C. Junk science
The risk of misconduct and mistake begins at the crime scene, where evidence may be destroyed or mishandled. Police then send the evidence to a forensic lab where it may be accidentally or intentionally contaminated, poorly tested or mislabeled. In the next step, a report on the lab's findings must be filed. Unfortunately, technicians and their superiors sometimes feign results. DNA exoneration has revealed numerous instances of what is called "drylabbing" evidence. That is, falsely reporting results when, in fact, no test was ever performed. It's cheap and saves time for the labs, but it's a crime that it sends innocent people to their deaths (The Innocence Project 2007).

D. False confessions
False confessions are very often the result of a mental illness or retardation, as well as from police torture (Center for Wrongful Convictions 2007).

Brian Baldwin went to his death in the Alabama electric chair for a murder his co-defendant claimed to have committed alone, without Baldwin's knowledge. Baldwin's conviction and death sentence rested on a confession that he claimed had been extracted through torture. The confession was incorrect about many important details, including how the victim died and what weapon had been used to murder her. Also, at the time of their arrest, there had been blood on Baldwin's co-defendant's clothes, but not on himself. Forensic evidence developed after Baldwin's trial indicated that a left-handed person had beaten the victim. Coincidently, Baldwin was right-handed. And yet, he was still put to death. He did not even have a previous criminal record.

Next, an article written by the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty on April 3, 2007, stated that based on a medical review of a dozen executions, the drugs used to execute prisoners in the United States sometimes fail to work as intended. This reportedly causes slow and painful deaths for prisoners.
The article also stated that even when administered properly, the three-drug lethal injection method appears to have caused some inmates to suffocate while they were conscious and unable to move, instead of simply having their hearts stopped while they are sedated (NCADP). This is a violation of constitutional rights and it blatantly disregards the protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

4. Capital Punishment Does Not Function For The Greater Interest of Society

Prosecuting a capital punishment case is extremely expensive for a state and it drains money that could be used for a greater purpose, such as, education and social programs. One capital punishment case costs more than sentencing a prisoner to life without parole. One study in the United States found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million more per execution than a non-death penalty murder case with a sentence of life imprisonment (ACLU 2007).

That said, recognizing that we are fallible constitutes a foundation for the protection of liberties. We must be suspicious of absolute judgment because, in the future, it will warn us against illogical ones. We should divert ourselves from the unalterable sentence of capital punishment because the usage of it claims ultimate knowledge, pretends infallibility and dismisses doubt. Therefore, I firmly believe capital punishment is a threat to our liberty and should be abolished.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): Death Penalty 101. 2007.
http://www.aclu.org/ capital/facts/10602r es20040917.html

Amnesty International. 2007. http://web.amnesty.o rg.

Center For Wrongful Convictions. 2007.
http://www.law.north western.edu/wrongful convictions/

The Innocence Project. 2007. http://www.innocence project.org/

National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP). 2007. "Executed in US may be awake as they suffocate." http://www.democracy inaction.org/dia/
organizations/ncadp/ news.jsp?key=3230. April 3, 2007.

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