A Cohesive Argument Against The Death Penalty

There is no avoiding the subject: the death penalty involves cases of great emotional ordeals. Hearing stories of victims being raped, murdered, or otherwise brutalized invokes anger in any decent person, and usually Democratic governors even refuse appeals to save convicts. I akin it to if I were walking down the street and saw a man hanging off a bridge, a list of his deeds tattooed on his forehead. I would not save him and I know few who would.

However, when laying the path for the futue of our nation, sentencing people to die is questionable at best. There is always the possibility that innocent people will be killed, and 5-10% of people sentenced to die later have their convictions overturned or are pardoned after death. That equates to hundreds of people murdered for crimes they did not commit.

It is not effective at deterring crime. Murder takes place for money or out of pure hatred, and killing people is not a deterrent. If anything, the prospect of having to sit in jail for the rest of one's life is worse than that of dying.

Needless to say, the death penalty is a blatant violation of the Constitution. Those who say that saving kids from guns violates the second amendment and stopping white supremacists and other bigots violates the first amendment don't see the obvious violation of the eighth amendment. The gas chamber that causes minutes of suffocation, hanging which breaks the neck or does the same, the electric chair that causes eyes to pop out of their sockets and lights hair on fire, and lethal injection that can induce 10-minute deaths by heart attack are all inhumane, and the latter is now virtually the sole method in use.

Nor is the death penalty economic. The costs of mandatory appeals, staff to ensure that it is carried out correctly, increased security at the end of life, and decreasing availability of the legal drugs mean that the average costs involved in the death penalty are actually HIGHER than those involved in life imprisonment. Death row inmates usually spend roughly twenty years in prison before death, anyways.

Support for the death penalty is falling. While it once fit into our society, it no longer does, and, if we are to evolve as a nation, we must stop trading an eye for an eye and start seeking real justice.