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, and more. Afterwards, there's the mandatory appeal process, which may also be largely covered by taxpayers. All of that adds up to big money; some sources quote a final cost of five or six times the cost of simply housing and feeding an inmate for life. And all of this extra money is for a punishment that studies have shown does not deter crime. In fact, in some cases, inmates would prefer the death penalty because it's a way out of prison.
And finally, most civilized countries in the world have long ago done away with the death penalty. For example, the death penalty has been completely abolished in 48 out of 50 European countries. The United States, by contrast, is currently ranked with such countries as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan for the number of executions carried out in recent years. And yet, the United States still has a serious problem with violent crime.
Even though I am personally against the death penalty, I do understand why some people support it. If I lost a loved one to murder, I'm sure I would be angry enough to want the killer to be executed, even though executing that person would never bring my loved one back, nor would it bring me any peace. I also think there are a few criminals in the world who are so dangerous that the death penalty is warranted just for the sake of public safety. But I also think that the way the death penalty is imposed in the United States today is unfair and, in some states, overused. And as long as there's the smallest chance that one innocent person will be executed, I will be against the death penalty. For those reasons, I think the United States should do away with the death penalty once and for all.