Capital punishment is a difficult medium in our
government to debate because there are so many different views of why it should
be kept or not, some are moral, some are more pragmatic. There are a lot of
problems with it. First off, it's costing American big bucks. Billions of
taxpayer dollars are being spent on it, money that could be used elsewhere,
like possibly getting us out of debt. We are billions of dollars in debt and
putting people on death row is just increasing that. Richard C. Dieter states, "The death penalty is clearly more expensive than a system handling similar cases with lesser punishment." These costs come from a variety of factors. First there's the cost of everything needed in a regular trial that doesn't concern death as punishment. Added onto that is more pre-trial time, experts, more attorneys, 2 trials instead of one, and a series of appeals. The many factors and lengthy trial period cause the death row process to have an extremely high price accredited with it. Life imprisonment without
parol would be a better option because citizens still wouldn't have to worry about
that person being out on the streets, and it's much cheaper.
Another problem with the death penalty is that it
gets rid of a wrongly accused person's possible chance of proving themselves
innocent. The man in the photograph to the right, Carlos Deluna, was convicted of murder and
executed. Later evidence showed that he had not committed the crime and was
wrongly accused. There are many others like this and most of the similar cases
that could be out there are unknown since usually once a person is executed,
the search for the criminal ends. Over 1,000 people have been executed since
1979 and there is a high change that many of those cases were flawed and the
person was not guilty. That possibility of ending the life of an innocent man
or woman makes many including myself believe that capital punishment should be
demolished immediately, because quite frankly, a judge and the jury never know
for sure what happened or who did what, all they can do is vote on what appears
to be the case.
-Michelle R.
Sources
http://deathpenalty.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=002000
No comments:
Post a Comment