Opinion
Face-off: Death Penalty fiscally and morally irresponsible
By Maude Wilson ’17
September 8, 2016
In preparation for this piece, I consulted my sister, who is both brilliant and stridently liberal on every issue I’ve ever discussed with her. I was surprised when she reported that she had mixed feelings about the death penalty. She argued that there was evil in the world and it is the role of our legal system to eradicate it. My stance on the matter didn’t evolve because I disagree that there are people who commit heinous, unforgivable crimes. I simply feel that the costs of capital punishment are astronomical in comparison to its benefits. The death penalty is expensive, ethically ambiguous, severely racially biased and proven to be ineffective. It is therefore illogical that we would continue to include it in our criminal justice system.
One of the most common arguments in favor of the death penalty in lieu of life without parole is that taxpayers should not have to pay the cost of a guilty man’s prison sentence. However, many studies have found that the cost of a life sentence is actually significantly less than that of the death penalty. The reason is fairly simple: given the finality of an execution, such trials usually incur high costs from more thorough investigations, special legal motions and lengthy juror selection processes. On top of the expenses of the original trial, the state must then pay to imprison the individual for the duration of their appeals process, which is typically quite extensive. A 2011 report by the Department of Justice found that the average convict spends 16.5 years on death row before their execution. All in all, the complex legal action required to execute someone can end up costing 2-5 times more than keeping that individual in prison for life. If America is looking to cut costs in its criminal justice system, we should replace the death penalty with life sentences, not the other way around.
Clearly, in addition to the economic costs, one must also consider the social and ethical costs of the death penalty. To begin with, how do we justify a punishment that is so blatantly racially biased? The statistics on this are clear. In death penalty cases, the most prominent predictor of the outcome of the trial is the race of the victim. Amnesty International estimates that 77 percent of death penalty convictions involved white victims, even though the FBI reports the percentage of homicide victims who are white to be 46 percent. This number is even more striking when paired with the fact that in 2007, a Yale Law School study found that in cases where the victim was white, defendants were three times more likely to receive the death penalty than in cases where the victim was African American. The racial biases of the death penalty don’t end with the race of the victim. A 2007 report by the American Bar Association found that one third of the death row inmates in Philadelphia would have received a life imprisonment sentence had they not been African American. Obviously, these statistics mirror the racial biases that can be found throughout our criminal justice system, and complicate the matter even more.
We must also consider carefully how we factor those who have been wrongly convicted into this equation. A common argument is that DNA technology has evolved so much that it is hardly ever wrong, but 90 percent of murder trials don’t include DNA evidence and there is still error in the 10 percent that do. To date, the Innocence Project has exonerated 300 prisoners wrongfully convicted using DNA evidence, including 18 who were on death row. Furthermore, University of Michigan professor Samuel Gross conservatively estimated a four percent wrongful conviction rate in death penalty cases. This means that of the 2,943 Americans currently on death row, 117 of them are innocent.
Perhaps these are all costs we would be willing to pay if the death penalty saved lives. However, most experts agree it does not. In 2009, a study of criminologists found that 88 percent believed the death penalty did not deter murder. To put this into perspective, consider that this is a higher number than the percentage of scientists who believe that humans caused global warming. Criminologists are not the only experts who feel this way. A poll of police chiefs done the same year by the Death Penalty Information Center reported that they considered the death penalty one of the least effective ways to reduce violent crime. Professor John Blume of Cornell Law’s Death Penalty Project put it most unambiguously when he said, “no reliable study by credible researchers has ever found any deterrent effect [of the death penalty].”
Or perhaps we would be willing to pay the price, even though the death penalty doesn’t deter criminals, if execution would console the families of victims — but studies show it doesn’t do this either. A study done in 2012 by the Marquette Law Review compared families of murder victims, and found that those who lived in states without death penalties reported, over time, better mental and physical health, as well as more satisfaction with the criminal justice system.
However, for most Americans, their feelings about capital punishment go beyond the bounds of economic or social costs. For many, the ethical costs of the death penalty are much more difficult to navigate. The issue then becomes how we, as a society, weigh the cost of a human life. How do we decide who “deserves” to die? What crime is “bad enough” to warrant execution? This ambiguity causes tremendous problems in death penalty cases, because the finality of the death penalty makes people uncomfortable. Yet, we ask jurors with various philosophical, religious and ethical beliefs to make these decisions. We ask the medical community to perform lethal injections, even though the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Society of Anesthesiologists and the companies who produce the drugs used in the procedure all consider executions to be a breach of ethics. We allow for ambiguity where there should be none.
To see the other side of the argument, click here