Death Penalty

Sir Winston Churchill once stated, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” No matter how beautiful the death penalty may look, the results are far from beautiful. The death penalty is ineffective, cost society too much monetarily, and there are better solutions, which is why we should no longer use it in our society. The death penalty is extremely ineffective because it is either not used often or many times putting innocent people to death. The number of people put to death in our country now day is down significantly. For example in Texas there has been a decline of about sixty percent in death penalty use according to TimeUS. Many people convicted to death will sit in prison for years as if they were simply sentenced to prison. This is because of the appeal process we give to the prisoners. It’s harder to actually carry out the punishment. This may be due to the fact that in the past we have seen innocent people sentenced to death and then had the punishment carried out. Meanwhile, we are also seeing an increased cost to society for any person convicted to death. We pay more as taxpayers for a person sentenced to death than someone who is sentenced to even a maximum-security prison. This is because we have a judicial process that gives death row inmates the ability to appeal their case. This is supposed to make it so we don’t have innocent people convicted, but it is flawed since we have still seen innocent people convicted. To give you an idea of the cost, Death Penalty Focus reported that to hold a person convicted of death in prison it costs roughly $90,000 more per year per inmate than if they were put in prison for life. Yes, it is quite expensive. There is no reason we as taxpayers should be paying more for prisoners who have been convicted of the most heinous crimes we can imagine. Finally, there is a better solution. The number of people we have in prison is a staggering amount sitting at about 2.2 million people according to stopthedrugwar.org; however, 1.1 million of them are in prison for crimes such as drug possession or property crimes. Minor crimes that put them in prison. Having a system of simply parole for these crimes would be a better solution to putting them in prison. It could lower the number of prisoners and it would in the end cost our society a lot less money. It would open up space in our prisons, which we could then use to house the prisoners who are sitting on death row and may sit there for years before being convicted. When it comes to the death penalty, it costs us a lot more than it gets us. Why do we need to sacrifice effectiveness, money, and better solutions for something as replaceable as the death penalty. We don’t. This blog post is an official entry for the <a href="http://www.joshuapondlaw.com/scholarship">Law Blogger’s Scholarship</a>, sponsored by The Law Office of Joshua Pond, <a href="http://www.joshuapondlaw.com/">http://www.joshuapondlaw.com</a>. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2039273,00.html https://death.rdsecure.org/article.php?id=42 http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/409/toohigh.shtml