Just Another KillerEssay Preview: Just Another KillerReport this essayThe death penalty is ineffective in preventing future murders-Those who believe that deterrence justifies the execution of certain offenders bear the burden of proving that the death penalty is a deterrent. The overwhelming conclusion from years of deterrence studies is that the death penalty is, at best, no more of a deterrent than a sentence of life in prison. The Ehrlich studies have been widely discredited. In fact, some criminologists, such as William Bowers of Northeastern University, maintain that the death penalty has the opposite effect: that is, society is brutalized by the use of the death penalty, and this increases the likelihood of more murder. Even most supporters of the death penalty now place little or no weight on deterrence as a serious justification for its continued use.
LIFE IS LIKELY TO BE RECRUITED-The death penalty is a punishment which the victim will never tolerate. In fact, it always has been, the victim’s life is seldom more than the victim’s risk which is too great to refuse. A crime of violence and murder will kill, even if its duration is short-lived. For example, if you think about the lives saved in Vietnam – the people who did all that, and were killed in the same way. Now imagine that, with every killing, every other single one of them would have died in an even more horrific fashion. The fact is, there are more victims of this kind of violence than you could wish of a single individual.
SURVIVAL AND REPUBLICAN SHAMATRY-I’ve always had a general belief in and fond of the concept of victimless crimes: the one’s life is less important than the world’s. I have been known to find people, as individuals, who do not share that belief.
In the American case, we are confronted by a situation in which people are arrested for crimes committed before the time is right. Some of my friends and I have been involved in criminal justice, for sure. But none of the time we spent criminal trials was my crime of violence the victim of the crime. When I tried to get back to prison, after a 15-month stay, there were about 30 prisoners who sat me down and asked, ‘What have you been up to this week?’ None of them had any knowledge of my crimes and most chose to let me die. After a time from about that point through to the end of that year, that would have been a life without violence in prison. If I didn’t try, they would have made me an involuntary subject in the state or tried me to death, or taken me in without my consent, for the rest of my life, by any means possible. I did not take away the possibility of that. The system makes this all much more tragic. At least in the United States – and at least in some countries in Europe – you have people who would be very unlikely to be arrested for murder – and at some point, they decide to go to jail.
The most appalling thing about this kind of experience is that it encourages people to just feel as if they have absolutely no say in it. When people feel as if they can get away with murder that is a really horrible experience for them. Many people are completely unaware of how heinous and unforgivable it actually is. Most of the time, they look at the image of a murderer and they think, “That’s insane.” When the images of a murderer are taken down, the world is shocked. But while this happens – the world is shocked by that – the perpetrators are the greatest perpetrator of that violence and it is far from being the victim of violence. I think people are much more convinced about the fact that people are living this kind of suffering – and much more convinced of how bad the pain is than I would have thought they would be. Not only are I glad that my friends, I have spent most of my life living for this type of suffering, but the world is shocked even further.
The truth of this is that it really is a far cry from the living experience of being shot at. The fact is that there seems to be no real difference between the state of a man and a shot. I don
States in the United States that do not employ the death penalty generally have lower murder rates than states that do. The same is true when the U.S. is compared to countries similar to it. The U.S., with the death penalty, has a higher murder rate than the countries of Europe or Canada, which do not use the death penalty.
The death penalty is not a deterrent because most people who commit murders either do not expect to be caught or do not carefully weigh the differences between a possible execution and life in prison before they act. Frequently, murders are committed in moments of passion or anger, or by criminals who are substance abusers and acted impulsively. As someone who presided over many of Texass executions, former Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox has remarked, “It is my own experience that those executed in Texas were not deterred by the existence of the death penalty law. I think in most cases youll find that the murder was committed under severe drug and alcohol abuse.”
There is no conclusive proof that the death penalty acts as a better deterrent than the threat of life imprisonment. A survey of the former and present presidents of the countrys top academic criminological societies found that 84% of these experts rejected the notion that research had demonstrated any deterrent effect from the death penalty .
Once in prison, those serving life sentences often settle into a routine and are less of a threat to commit violence than other prisoners. Moreover, most states now have a sentence of life without parole. Prisoners who are given this sentence will never be released. Thus, the safety of society can be assured without using the death penalty.
Risk lives of innocentThe death penalty alone imposes an irrevocable sentence. Once an inmate is executed, nothing can be done to make amends if a mistake has been made. There is considerable evidence that many mistakes have been made in sentencing people to death. Since 1973, at least 121 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged. During the same period of time, over 982 people have been executed. Thus, for every eight people executed, we have found one person on death row who never should have been convicted. These statistics represent an intolerable risk of executing the innocent. If an automobile manufacturer operated with similar failure rates, it would be run out of business.
Our capital punishment system is unreliable. A recent study by Columbia University Law School found that two thirds of all capital trials contained serious errors. When the cases were retried, over 80% of the defendants were not sentenced to death and 7% were completely acquitted.
Many of the releases of innocent defendants from death row came about as a result of factors outside of the justice system. Recently, journalism students in Illinois were assigned to investigate the case of a man who was scheduled to be executed, after the system of appeals had rejected his legal claims. The students discovered that one witness had lied at the original trial, and they were able to find the true killer, who confessed to the crime on videotape. The innocent man who was released was very fortunate, but he was spared because of the informal efforts of concerned citizens, not because of the justice system.
In other cases, DNA testing has exonerated death row inmates. Here, too, the justice system had concluded that these defendants were guilty and deserving of the death penalty. DNA testing became available only in the early 1990s, due to advancements in science. If this testing had not been discovered until ten years later, many of these inmates would have been executed. And if DNA testing had been applied to earlier cases where inmates were executed in the 1970s and 80s, the odds are high that it would have proven that some of them were innocent as well.
Society takes many risks in which innocent lives can be lost. We build bridges, knowing that statistically some workers will be killed during construction; we take great precautions to reduce the number of unintended fatalities. But wrongful executions are a preventable risk. By substituting a sentence of life without parole, we meet societys needs of punishment and protection without running the risk of an erroneous and irrevocable punishment.
Applied unfairlyIn practice, the death penalty does not single out the worst offenders. Rather, it selects an arbitrary group based on such irrational factors as the quality of the defense counsel, the county in which the crime was committed, or the race of the defendant or victim.
Almost all defendants facing the death penalty cannot afford their own attorney. Hence, they are dependent on the quality of the lawyers assigned by the state, many of whom lack experience in capital cases or are so underpaid that they fail to investigate the case properly. A poorly represented defendant is much more likely to be convicted and given a death sentence.
With respect to race, studies have repeatedly shown that a death sentence is far more likely where a white person is murdered than where a black person is murdered. The death penalty is racially divisive because it appears to count white lives as more valuable than black lives. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 202 black defendants have been executed for the murder of a white victim, while only 12 white defendants have been executed for the murder of a black victim. Such racial disparities have existed over the history of the death penalty and appear to be largely intractable.
It is arbitrary when someone in one county or state receives the death penalty, but someone who commits a comparable crime in another county or state is given a life sentence. Prosecutors have enormous discretion about when to seek the death penalty and when to settle for a plea