THE DEATH PENALTY
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pros and cons
YES on Death Penalty |
NO on Death Penalty |
MORALITY
According to Bruce Fein, JD, a Constitutional Lawyer and General Counsel to the Center for Law and Accountability:
"The crimes of rape, torture, treason, kidnapping, murder, larceny, and perjury pivot on a moral code that escapes apodictic [indisputably true] proof by expert testimony or otherwise. But communities would plunge into anarchy if they could not act on moral assumptions less certain than that the sun will rise in the east and set in the west. Abolitionists may contend that the death penalty is inherently immoral because governments should never take human life, no matter what the provocation. But that is an article of faith, not of fact. The death penalty honors human dignity by treating the defendant as a free moral actor able to control his own destiny for good or for ill; it does not treat him as an animal with no moral sense." |
According to Bryan Stevenson, JD, a professor at Law at New York University of School of Law:
"Ultimately, the moral question surrounding capital punishment in America has less to do with whether those convicted of violent crime deserve to die than with whether state and federal governments deserve to kill those whom it has imprisoned. The legacy of racial apartheid, racial bias, and ethnic discrimination is unavoidably evident in the administration of capital punishment in America. Death sentences are imposed in a criminal justice system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent. This is an immoral condition that makes rejecting the death penalty on moral grounds not only defensible but necessary for those who refuse to accept unequal or unjust administration of punishment." |
COST OF DEATH VS LIFE IN PRISON
According to Dudley Sharp from the Director of Death Penalty Resources at Justice for All:
"Many opponents present, as fact, that the cost of the death penalty is so expensive (at least $2 million per case?), that we must choose life without parole ('LWOP') at a cost of $1 million for 50 years. Predictably, these pronouncements may be entirely false. JFA [Justice for All] estimates that LWOP cases will cost $1.2 million-$3.6 million more than equivalent death penalty cases. There is no question that the up front costs of the death penalty are significantly higher than for equivalent LWOP cases. There also appears to be no question that, over time, equivalent LWOP cases are much more expensive... than death penalty cases. Opponents ludicrously claim that the death penalty costs, over time, 3-10 times more than LWOP." |
According to Richard C. Dieter, MS, JD, an Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center
"In the course of my work, I believe I have reviewed every state and federal study of the costs of the death penalty in the past 25 years. One element is common to all of these studies: They all concluded that the cost of the death penalty amounts to a net expense to the state and the taxpayers. Or to put it differently,the death penalty is clearly more expensive than a system handling similar cases with a lesser punishment. [It] combines the costliest parts of both punishments: lengthy and complicated death penalty trials, followed by incarceration for life... Everything that is needed for an ordinary trial is needed for a death penalty case, only more so: • More pre-trial time... • More experts... • Twice as many attorneys... • Two trials instead of one will be conducted: one for guilt and one for punishment. • And then will come a series of appeals during which the inmates are held in the high security of death row." |
DETERRENCE
According to Ernest Van Den Haag, PhD, a late professor of Jurisprudence at Fordham University:
"Common sense, lately bolstered by statistics, tells us that the death penalty will deter murder... People fear nothing more than death. Therefore, nothing will deter a criminal more than the fear of death... life in prison is less feared. Murderers clearly prefer it to execution -- otherwise, they would not try to be sentenced to life in prison instead of death... Therefore, a life sentence must be less deterrent than a death sentence. And we must execute murderers as long as it is merely possible that their execution protects citizens from future murder." |
According to American Civil Liberties Union:
"[T]here is no credible evidence that the death penalty deters crime more effectively than long terms of imprisonment. States that have death penalty laws do not have lower crime rates or murder rates than states without such laws. And states that have abolished capital punishment show no significant changes in either crime or murder rates. The death penalty has no deterrent effect. Claims that each execution deters a certain number of murders have been thoroughly discredited by social science research." |
INCOME LEVEL
According to Joshua Marquis, JD, a District Attorney of Clatsop County, Oregon:
"The next urban legend is that of the threadbare but plucky public defender fighting against all odds against a team of sleek, heavily-funded prosecutors with limitless resources. The reality in the 21st century is startlingly different... the past few decades have seen the establishment of public defender systems that in many cases rival some of the best lawyers retained privately... Many giant silk-stocking law firms in large cities across America not only provide pro-bono counsel in capital cases, but also offer partnerships to lawyers whose sole job is to promote indigent capital defense." |
According to Helen Prejean, MA, an anti-death penalty activist and author of Dead Man Walking:
"Who pays the ultimate penalty for crimes? The poor. Who gets the death penalty? The poor. After all the rhetoric that goes on in legislative assemblies, in the end, when the net is cast out, it is the poor who are selected to die in this country. And why do poor people get the death penalty? It has everything to do with the kind of defense they get. Money gets you good defense. That's why you'll never see an O.J. Simpson on death row. As the saying goes: 'Capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment.'" |
Other points..
- A punishment for crimes committed against the rights to life, freedom and safety of victims.
- The death penalty can provide families of victims with some closure, which may help them to deal with their suffering. - A life spent in prison is a worse punishment than an execution. |
- Innocent people can be wrongly executed.
- Retribution is just another word for revenge and simply continues the cycle of violence – it is essentially just a form of the flawed concept that two wrongs can make a right: the pro argument is that killing people is wrong, therefore you should kill people for doing it, which just doesn’t make sense. |