by Jenny Tolley

Created on: February 04, 2009

I believe the time is long overdue to ban the death penalty in the United States. I didn't always feel this way, though. I grew up in Virginia, which is a big death penalty state. Most of the people I knew when I was coming of age strongly supported capital punishment. Many of them cited the biblical notion of "an eye for an eye". Some claimed that putting an inmate to death was cheaper than supporting them for the rest of their lives. And a few others talked about "justice for the victims".

As I grew older, I thought about the issue some more and did some research. I found out that whether or not someone gets the death penalty depends an awful lot on arbitrary things, like where the crime was committed, the perpetrator's race and gender, and whether or not he or she had enough money to hire a good lawyer. In some states, the death penalty is largely symbolic because there's a huge backlog of people waiting to be executed. Scott Peterson, for example, is one of several hundred people on death row in California. It's likely that he'll die of old age before he ever sees the death house. On the other hand, Virginia is frighteningly efficient about carrying out the death penalty. The so-called "21 day rule" is law in Virginia and it means that once 21 days have passed after a judge has signed the judgment order, a defendant cannot introduce new evidence into the appeals process. That's true even if the evidence would prove the defendant's innocence.

I also started reading news stories about prisoners who were found to be innocent and released from prison. The first thing that came to mind was the possibility that a death row inmate might be found innocent after his or her execution. I started wondering what I would do if I were in the position of having to tell the family of a wrongly executed man that he or she had actually been innocent. How does one apologize for something like that? For those who claim that most of the time the right person gets punished, I ask how they would feel if a wrongly executed inmate was one of their loved ones? What if YOU were the wrongly accused inmate?

Next, I explored the claim that executing a death row inmate would be cheaper than feeding and housing them for life. As it turns out, the death penalty is very expensive. First off, people who get sentenced to death tend to be poor to start with, which means they may or may not be paying their own legal expenses. The states pay for the judges, court appointed attorneys, expert witnesses,

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