Death Penalty Unfair, Innocent People Have Been Killed - Minaret

As a sophomore, I wrote an article for The Minaret on Troy Davis. He was executed in Georgia last year for the murder of a Savannah police officer. After seven of nine eye witnesses recanted their statements, in a conviction almost entirely relied upon by eyewitness territory,  many people began to advocate for Davis's innocence. It was the night that Davis was executed by lethal injection, Sept. 21, 2011, that I knew I would forever oppose the death penalty.

I took a course on the death penalty that same year where I originally heard about Davis's case. I didn't know what to think about capital punishment at first. I thought execution was an easy punishment. Criminals wouldn't have to suffer through life imprisonment but would be sentenced to die by a harmless injection that would kill them in a matter of minutes (if applied properly). That didn't seem like fitting punishment to me.

I thought, rather morbidly, that murderers should rot in prison until they died and that the only people the death penalty hurts are the families of the executed.  Then I would see victims' families during murder trials and sympathize with them, thinking, maybe the death penalty wasn't so bad after all.

But taking Death Penalty polarized me. By the semester's end, I strongly advocated against capital punishment, which I believe is keeping our country stuck in the past. According to Amnesty International, globally, 141 countries have abolished the death penalty. That's over two-thirds of the world. The United States is joined with countries like North Korea, China, Iran and Yemen that still institute the death penalty. All five of those countries had the majority of the world's executions in 2010.

In the U.S., 36 states still utilize capital punishment. Amnesty International reported, "Since 1973, 140 people have been released from death rows throughout the country due to evidence of their wrongful conviction. In this same time period, more than 1,200 people have been executed." 140 people is an astounding number when considering that they could have been executed.

The argument has been made that the court has been doing its job and sorting out those innocent people through the appeals process, but is it not possible that of those 1,200 plus people that have been executed in this country since 1973, some of them might have been innocent? I look at the execution of Davis and say that innocent lives have been taken, and that is reason enough for me that the death penalty needs to be abolished.

As I wrote in my Troy Davis article last year, Voltaire once said, "It is better to risk saving a guilty man than condemn an innocent one." Taking an innocent life is murder on behalf of the government and a total contradiction when the point of the death penalty is to execute murderers.  No innocent life is worth a hundred deaths of tried and true murderers, no matter how grizzly the crimes.

Our court system is not infallible and until it can be,  we cannot institute a punishment  with such finality as death. If a person is wrongly imprisoned for a certain amount of years, they can be paid back for their erroneous punishment. The government cannot pay back someone found to be innocent who is dead. The death penalty is irrevocable. Once a life is taken, it cannot be given back if error is found.

Proponents argue to keep the institution of capital punishment for a variety of reasons. Some advocate that the death penalty deters crime, but statistics have shown that there is no direct correlation between capital punishment and deterrence of crime. In 2008, FBI data indicated that the 14 states without the death penalty had homicide rates either at or below the national rate. I've always said, if a person is crazy, evil or angry enough to kill, no punishment will be enough to deter them.

There is also the false assumption that the death penalty is more cost effective than life imprisonment. That's a total myth. The actual act of executing an individual (injecting them with the three-chemical cocktail) is inexpensive compared to the legal fees and cost of extra security necessary to house inmates in single cells on death row. Death penalty defendants are given super due process, which is required in all death penalty cases, because of the seriousness of the trial. Because of that, investigation, trial and appeals costs add up, reaching into the hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.

According to Robert M. Bohm, author of "Deathquest," the average cost for an inmate sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, an alternative to the death penalty, is about $1 million if the sentence resulted from a plea bargain. The average costs for an execution in the U.S. ranges anywhere from $2.5 million to $5 million, but have been known to exceed that in popularized cases, like that of Ted Bundy where Florida spent $10 million toward his execution. Not every case is to that degree, or even close to the $100 million the federal government had to pay when executing the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The difference between the costs of capital punishment and LWOP (Life Without Parole) are still significant, however, and as taxpayers, how can we justify spending millions more for a death penalty case.

The death penalty is an archaic practice. As a country, we can't move forward with our civil and social rights when we practice the same punishment as countries like China, North Korea and Iran. It's time to abolish the death penalty.

Jessica Keesee can be reached at jessica.keesee@theminareonline.com