Carly Hill
Against Capital Punishment
Rewrite Paper
10/7/06
DNA testing, showing how many people have been mistakenly killed from the death penalty for crimes they did not commit has made Capital Punishment a hot topic once again. Over and over again, Congress has debated weather or not this is an effective alternative. Some of the topics of congresses’ hot debates are the costliness of capital punishment, the killing of the mentally ill criminals, and the killing of the innocent.
Capital Punishment is quite a costly way of removing criminals from our society. States who practice Capital Punishment always complain about the lack of funds needed to house inmates in prisons of the state. However, all of these states, like North Carolina, Texas, Kansas, Delaware, and Florida all spend millions of millions of dollars using the death penalty. The must build facilites and but supplies and such. All of this money could be used for building state prisons and penitentiaries to house the criminals. According to a Duke University study done in 1993, the death penalty in North Carolina cost 2.16 million dollars more per execution than a non-death penalty murder trial up to that year. Research in other states that have the death penalty, like Kansas and North Carolina, point out that other cases of capitol punishment are three to six times more costly than life imprisonment. In 1999, the New Mexico State Public Defender Department estimated the state would save $1 to 2.5 million dollars per year on Public Defender costs alone if the government found another substitute for the death penalty.
(www.mfvr.org/deathpenaltyfacts.htm)
FNSA.org also noted that Capital Punishment costs run in the millions. They said that Texas, a death penalty case costs taxpayers an average of $2.3 million, about three times the cost of putting someone in prison in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. Also, in other studies they conducted, they claimed that in Florida, each execution is costing the state $3.2 million, that in California, which is “financially strapped”, the state could save $90 million each year by abolishing capital punishment. The New York Department of Correctional Services estimated that implementing the death penalty would cost the state about $118 million annually. (http://www.fnsa.org/v1n1/dieter1.html)
There have been many cases in the US involving the death of the mentally ill through Capital Punishment. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, over 60 people diagnosed as mentally ill or with mental retardation have been executed in the United States since 1983 alone. While accurate statistics are not available, it is estimated that 5 to 10 percent of people on death row have a serious mental illness. They also claim that over 30 percent of male mentally ill inmates and 78 percent of female mentally ill inmates reported physical or sexual abuse, leading to mental problems. The 1986
Supreme Court decision, Ford vs. Wainwright, ruled that the execution of the insane goes against the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Ford only forbids the execution of a person who does not understand the reason for, or the reality of, his or her punishment. Unfortunately, many people who are mentally ill do not qualify as being insane, which results in severely mentally inept people being executed on a regular basis. Therefore, Ford has provided very minimal protection and has not prevented the executions of seriously mentally ill prisoners.
(http://www.aclu.org/capital/mentalillness/10617pub20050131.html)
According to an online article by National Center For Policy Analysis many people have been killed because of a crime they did not commit on death row. They said that researchers Hugo Bedau and Michael Radelet claim they discovered 23 instances of wrongful executions between 1900 and 1986 -- but that only one of those executions occurred after 1976. The NCPA also said that Stephen Markham and Paul Cassell, who were Justice Department lawyers during the Reagan administration, reviewed the actual transcripts for 13 of the 23 cases -- every one since 1950, the date after which they could get original court records -- and demonstrated that the alleged executed innocents were "guilty as sin." In another study that was conducted by Leah Hill, a junior majoring in women's studies and a Thursday columnist for The Daily Collegian., claimed that since 1900, there have been 23 documented cases of innocent people being executed in the United States alone.
Though in the past few years there have been few mistakes (that have been caught in any case) involving alleged criminals being killed from the death penalty, those people who did loose their lives, can not be brought back and the families have gone through much pain and suffering because of mistakes. All together, taxpayers spend millions of dollars on this form of inhumane, unjust form of punishment every year. It is a lot cheaper to house an inmate for 40 years in a single cell instead. It is unethical, costly, risky, and inhumane. Capitol Punishment should be abolished from the United States as we should use better alternatives for punishing criminals.
Carly Hill
Rewrite
Against Capital Punishment |
