No, don’t kill the death penalty. It’s working
By Alexander Adams | December 5, 2016
Support for the death penalty has
precipitously fallen over the past two decades. Many use this data point to
claim that a full death penalty repeal is near. However, the data says
something else entirely.
Support for the death penalty
peaked in 1994, just as the crack-cocaine boom came to an end and crime was the
number one issue. In 1994, the murder rate was 9.0 out of every 100,000
people; by 2012, the murder rate has fallen to 4.7 out of every 100,000
people, almost a 50% decrease. If crime were to explode again, support of the
death penalty would likely rise.
Despite decreasing crime, there
are still many good reasons why the United States should continue to use the
death penalty.
1) Innocents are worse off when
the death penalty is banned
A sensational study
in 2014 concluded that 1-of-25 people executed will turn out to be innocent.
What people forget to mention, however, is that the same study says innocents
may be worse off if the death penalty were not in place.
How can this be? On page two of
the study, the authors say, “Capital defendants who are removed from death row
but not exonerated—typically because their sentences are reduced to life
imprisonment—no longer receive the extraordinary level of attention that is
devoted to death row inmates. … If they are in fact innocent, they are much
less likely to be exonerated than if they had remained on death row.”
In other words, due to the fact
our society understands the irreversibility of execution, our government makes
it very difficult to actually execute a criminal. There is a long, drawn out
period where the appeals process can maximize the chance for an innocent to get
released.
The standard for evidence in capital cases is also much higher. In
non-capital cases, where the highest sentence is life without parole, the
standard for evidence is lower and fewer appeals are given, which makes it
harder for those wrongly imprisoned to get out. Overall, that means death
penalty abolition would harm, rather than help, innocent prisoners.
2) Death penalty costs are
exaggerated
We often hear how the death
penalty is expensive, and therefore conservatives should oppose it. These
studies, however, never take into account plea bargaining, which allows the
state to avoid trial entirely. The plea bargain effect alone makes the death
penalty cost only 30% more than life without parole, according to a study by
the Criminal
Justice Legal Foundation. That’s hardly a backbreaking expense.
According to the book Lethal Injection: Capital
Punishment in Texas During the Modern Era, written by liberal academics
Jon Sorensen and Rocky Lean Pilgrim, the death penalty costs roughly the same
as equivalent life without parole cases when geriatric care, plea bargains, and
housing are taken into account.
http://victimsfamiliesforthedeathpenalty.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/immanuel-kants-pro-death-penalty-quote.html |
3) The death penalty does, in
fact, deter crime
Do experts think the death
penalty fails to deter crime? No. Opponents of the death penalty love to cite a
study by the Death Penalty Information Center which claims 88% of
criminologists say the death penalty fails to deter murder. It’s
bunk. The sample unanimously said that the death penalty deters at least
some; the question is only whether or not the experts thought it was
“significant.”
Economist Joanna Shepard’s 2004 study
concluded that each execution deterred three additional murders. Is that
significant? In Illinois, the governor commuting the sentence of all death row
inmates led
to an estimated 150 more homicides than there otherwise would have been. Is
that significant?
We can debate whether or not the
death penalty deters crime a “significant amount,” whatever that means, but no
one can realistically say that the death penalty doesn’t deter crime at all.
The case against the death
penalty is not nearly as strong as abolitionists, as they like to call
themselves, would have you think. Costs aren’t exorbitantly high, innocents
aren’t wantonly slaughtered, and lives are, in fact, saved. The death penalty
should remain a part of our criminal justice system.
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://redalertpolitics.com/2016/12/05/no-dont-kill-death-penalty-working/#1PFC4x6XkzCJuZBe.99
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