Christopher Paez

April 11, 2011

Do WE Really…

If two negatives make a positive, do two wrongs make a right? The death penalty

tests this situation; when a judge convicts a murderer to death by lethal injection, is the

judge not doing the same as the convicted? Having one person killed for killing someone

is also very similar to a law once made by Hammurabi; “An eye for and eye…” Does the

American government want to be correlated to that? With the shape the American

economy is presently, disrupted and crippled, can we afford this? The death penalty

should be abolished for these two reasons as well: The cost of lethal injection cost a

plethora amount of money and there is no way to ‘right’ the innocently convicted seeing

as you can not bring back a person from the dead.

Many feel that the death of the murderer will somehow, indirectly, bring a sort of

closure. As I can see how so, wouldn’t one agree that a life of punishment is far more

effective and teaches the criminal a longer lesson rather than giving them a way to escape

the pressures and guilt of taking ones life. One may also say that elimination of capital

punishment shows that the justice system shows more sympathy for criminals than it does

victims. This argument is invalid for several reasons: if an innocent man is accused of the

murder isn’t he a victim and criminals first have to be convicted once done so the justice

system follows procedure and gives the appropriate sentence, whether or not it be death

or not. One may also bring up the situation which a prisoner escapes which can give

criminals another chance to kill, but in the most recent statistic on prisoner escapes, it
showed that a little more than one-half of 1 percent of the total population of 1,100,224

state prisoners actually escapes.

"It is immoral in principle and unfair and discriminatory in practice [...] No one

deserves to die. When the government metes out vengeance disguised as justice, it

becomes complicit with killers in devaluing human life and human dignity.”, [quoted

from the ACLU.] The quote is perhaps the best way to view the morality aspect of the

death penalty. In the modernized western society of the United States, the American

government discards the belief of literally doing to criminals what they do to their

victims. For instance the punishment for rape is not rape, or for arson, the burning down

of the arsonist's house. We should not, furthermore, punish the murderer with death. The

message exhibited from the American government for capitol punishment is: Lets kill

people who kill people to show killing is wrong. Do WE, as Americans, want that

message?

As stated by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee of the California

Legislature; “Elimination of the death penalty would result in a net savings to the state of

at least several tens of millions of dollars annually, and a net savings to local

governments in the millions to tens of millions of dollars on a statewide basis.”

Acknowledging that is just one state, imagine if states with higher amounts of death

penalty cases follow, such as Texas. Conceivability, this in turn will decrease national

debt and possibly eliminate it.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Each death penalty case in Texas costs

taxpayers about $2.3 million. That is about three times the cost of imprisoning someone

in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. The astonishing numbers are a
result of the endless appeals that require additional procedures that clog our court system.

The U.S. court system goes to enormous lengths before allowing a death sentence to be

carried out. All the appeals, motions, hearings, briefs, etc. monopolize much of the time

of judges, attorneys, and other court employees as well as use up courtrooms & facilities.

This is time and space that could be used for other unresolved matters.

The death penalty should be abolished for many reasons as stated before:

Morality, financial, punishment of the innocent, endless appeals by the courthouse that

spent time and money, that life in prison is a worse punishment than being set free in the

sense that the guilty do not have to deal with the pressures and guilt of taking ones life,

and that capitol punishment sends the wrong message. Following the abolishment of

capital punishment the money saved gets many purposes: to reduce and possibly

eliminate national debt, funds the educational system, and the push for clean energy.