Though developed, non-authoritarian countries all over Western Europe and North America abandoned capital punishment years ago, the United States remains the only country in those regions to have not done so. In fact, the United States is ranked in the top five countries in terms of state killings, along with Saudi Arabia, China, Iraq, and Iran. Although the United States frequently criticizes these very countries for their human rights records, it engages in the same practice as these regimes.
The United States needs to stop and reevaluate its use of the death penalty—especially since the nation claims to stand for equal protection under the law and human rights. Ultimately, the death penalty should be abolished because of the financial waste, racist and classist discrimination, risk of fallibility, and moral obscenities inherent in its use.
To begin, the death penalty is financially wasteful since it diverts resources that could be used for better law enforcement. The average cost for the defense in a federal death penalty trial is about $620,000—around eight times the average cost for a murder trial with no penalty. In Florida alone, for example, the cost of the death penalty has totaled over $1.5 billion since 1978. It has also been estimated that if the governor of Florida commuted the sentences of all those currently on death row and replaced these sentences with life in prison without parole, the state would save $51 million a year.
This money would be better spent in underfunded areas such as mental health services. Currently, Florida spends roughly $742 million a year on mental health, and is ranked 49th out of 50 states for spending in this area per capita. These savings of $51 million a year could provide a small but significant boost of nearly 7 percent in funding. This additional money could be used to provide support for the families of murder victims. It could also help treat mental illness, a significant contributor to crime. Indeed, a study by the School of Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania showed that ten percent of homicides in the US are committed by mentally ill individuals who have not received treatment.
This money could also provide a needed boost to public education. While Florida spends over $1 million per death row inmate, the state only spends around $9,000 per student per year and ranks 41st out of the 50 states in this category. Given that there are currently 346 death row inmates in Florida right now, eliminating the death penalty would provide over 300 million additional dollars in resources for the state to invest in elementary and high school students.
Another problem with the death penalty is the risk of killing innocent people. Indeed, the number of exonerations based on DNA evidence has risen steadily since 2011. 2016 set a record for exonerations with 54 people exonerated of homicide across the country. And since the 1970s, 161 individuals have served on death row, dozens of them for decades, before being exonerated.
These exonerations prove that the criminal justice system is not infallible. Had these people already been executed, there would have been no way to reverse this injustice. According to a study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, approximately 4.1 percent of defendants sentenced to death are wrongly convicted, and only around half of these defendants are ultimately exonerated. The study thus concluded that around 120 death row inmates out of the nearly 3,000 being held and awaiting execution are innocent.
In addition to these other issues, it is clear that the death penalty is applied in a racist and classist manner. For example, although African Americans make up less than 10 percent of California’s population, a plurality of those found wrongfully convicted on death row since 1989 have been black.
Those who are wealthy enough to afford talented lawyers are also much less likely to receive the death penalty than those provided with a public defender. A study of the federal death penalty involving murder cases showed that while the bottom third of defendants with the least amount spent on representation costs had a 44 percent chance of receiving a death sentence, the other two-thirds only had a 19 percent chance of receiving it. Clearly, wealth strongly protects against capital punishment.
Finally, although it may not be the only reason many oppose capital punishment, the death penalty also poses an inherent moral problem. Even if all the aforementioned problems were addressed, the death penalty would still allow the state to do to criminals the exact thing that it punishes them for. If the government truly wants to emphasize the value of human life and the horror of killing, it should not take part in this business itself. It is just as Sister Helen Prejean, a national leader in the fight against the death penalty, wrote to the Arkansas governor after he had ordered an execution that was later completed: “Why do we kill people to show that killing people is wrong?”
Going forward, it is crucial that supporters of abolition continue to enlighten voters on these facts. People may fundamentally disagree on whether it is morally right for the government to execute murderers of the worst kind. However, everyone can agree that a system that wastes resources, targets the poor and minorities at disproportionately high levels, and runs a risk of killing innocent people is not one that is working.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Adam Jones, Ph.D.