In April 2014, an Oklahoma death row inmate suffered 40 minutes of suffering agony after being injected with a serum that was supposed to cause a quick and painless death. Instead, Clayton Lockett writhed on the gurney in agony while in front of petrified witnesses and then even gasped and spoke after being pronounced unconscious before dying of a fatal heart attack. Unfortunately, these stories of botched executions are all too familiar. Today in the U.S. there are only 19 states that have abolished capital punishment, leaving 31 states that still execute criminals. William Tucker, a journalist and author of Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime in America, wrote an article titled “The Death Penalty Is a Deterrent to Murder” in which he argues why capital punishment is an effective punishment in America. However, I argue that not only does the death penalty not deter crime, but also it is extremely expensive and incredibly fallible.
Tucker’s strongest point lies in the part of his article where he argues that the threat of a death penalty reduces murders because it changes what would otherwise become felony murders into simply felonies. For example, Tucker writes “ For a criminal pulling off a holdup—or a rapist, or a “surprised” burglar caught by a homeowner—there’s a very simple logic at work. The victims of your crimes are also the principal witnesses. They will call the police the minute you depart. They can identify you. They will probably testify at your trial. There’s a very simple way to prevent all this: kill them” (Tucker). His logic is that a death penalty draws that fine line between felonies and felony murders, and makes criminals less likely to cross that line. He explains how “If the penalty for rape or robbery is jail time, and for murder is more jail time after that, there isn’t a huge incentive to prevent you from pulling the trigger” (Tucker). According to Tucker, the death penalty provides this incentive and lowers murder rates in America.
Although this logic seems extremely sound, statistics would disagree. According to Max Ehrenfreund’s article in The Washington Post titled “There’s still no evidence that executions deter criminals”, he writes that violent crimes have been steadily declining for decades in all states, unaffected by changes in capital punishment laws. In fact, Ehrenfreund sites the following graph:
This chart shows that from 1960-2000, states that enforced the death penalty on average have consistently higher homicide rates. Although there is a spike in crime following the abolition of the death penalty, it is very brief and actually returns to values lower than they were previously before the death penalty is reinstated, which is followed by another spike in crime. The article also compares the murder rates from 1967-2007 in two “Asian metropolises”, Hong-Kong and Singapore. In Hong-Kong capital punishment has been abolished since 1993, and in Singapore the death penalty is mandatory for murder and other crimes. Surprisingly the murder rates in both cities have been steadily declining at very similar rates despite their different stances on capital punishment. This evidence clearly shows that there seems to be no correlation between capital punishment and crime rates, and Ehrenfreund says that this could possibly be attributed to the mind state of killers. A lot of killers are not in a state of mind that allows them to evaluate the situation that well. There is often alcohol or other drugs involved, possibly mental illness, or even sheer anger. Killers are not thinking about being tried and put to death, they are only concerned with if they will be caught or not, not what comes after that. So what purpose does the death penalty serve if it truly doesn’t deter criminals?
Tucker also mentions how much cheaper it is to put a man to death than it is to house him in a prison and provide food and clothes and run so many prisons. Although this is true, what Tucker is forgetting is that convicted death row inmates are not immediately sent to their deaths, there is a long drawn out appeals process, all while the criminals are housed in special prisons of their own. According to a Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review study, the extra security that is required for these death row inmates costs over $100,000 per inmate each year. On top of that the state also pays up to $300,000 for each inmate to receive and attorney to represent him or her in court during the appeals process. This begs the question, if it is cheaper and just as effective to imprison a criminal than to kill them, then why not just sentence these criminals to life without parole? In the sate of California, “the least expensive death penalty trial in the history of the state still cost $1.1 million more than the most expensive case seeking life without parole” (Galik). With the tough economic times, it is shocking to see how much taxpayer dollars could be saved all while saving lives in the process, especially when some of those lives could potentially be innocent citizens.
The fact that there are already plenty of innocent people wrongly convicted of crimes is a tragedy, and that tragedy would increase unfathomably if these innocent citizens were put to death. The fact that it is even a possibility that innocent people would be killed is enough of a reason to abolish capital punishment, because what good is enforcing a policy if it results in the same thing that it is trying to prevent? Each time a convict would be sentenced to death, it would be a matter of luck whether or not the correct man is being sentenced, and sure it likely is the correct man so the odds are in our favor, but who is willing to roll the dice at the cost of someone else’s life?