The Death Penalty By Sara Campbell B4

When I was younger, I used to eat a banana every day that they were available to me. I loved how soft and sweet they were. My dad on the other hand was highly allergic to them. I wanted to share my love of bananas with him, but I knew that while I loved them, they would only hurt my dad. Many people in the world are allergic to foods, plants, animals, etc., and as a solution to this problem, we simply try to keep them away from those people who they would hurt. We do the same with most criminals, however many are actually killed rather than imprisoned. This is called capital punishment, or the death penalty, and is highly controversial. The death penalty should be abandoned and replaced with life in prison without chance of parole because the latter is a better and more practical punishment for the following reasons: one, it is not cruel or unusual, two, it costs much less, and three, it is more efficient. Once you kill another human being, it cant be undone, and if you ask any one person, theyll probably agree that its a cruel and unusual thing to do. And yet, a majority of Americans the idea of capital punishment (David 39-41). So the question is: Why? Well, some people think that it is our moral obligation to support the death penalty because it protects the innocent by eliminating threats. They deserve to die, they say. But the U.S. prides itself on being just and fair, and the fact is, we are human and so we make mistakes. Every life taken, whether innocent or not, has an effect on countless other people. Many of the criminals families dont want their family member taken, and even some victims families see it as just another death. By sentencing murderers to life in prison without chance of parole, they can both be punished and

the public protected in a more humane way, and the cycle of killing prevented from continuing. The 8th Amendment of the constitution states nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted ("Yale Law School"). However this is violated every time someone is killed. Current execution methods vary from an overly complicated combination of drugs to actual electric chairs! And, to make matters worse, procedures frequently go wrong. In 1990, Jesse Taferos head caught fire when a sponge in Floridas electric chair was improperly replaced! A prison worker had been sent to pick up a sponge from the supermarket and he bought a synthetic sponge instead of a genuine sea sponge. This brings me to my next point. While not much thought goes into the actual killing of the criminals, it costs millions of dollars for each and every person waiting on death row, whether they are eventually killed or not. Less than three out of one hundred sentences are carried out in any given year, while hundreds of people wait on death row. But they dont just sit there, waiting. From the day they are sentenced, appeals are going out on their case. The appeals are necessary because many people on death row are actually proven innocent. Eighteen people have been proven innocent and exonerated by DNA testing in the United States after serving time on death row. They were convicted in 11 states and served a combined 229 years in prison including 202 years on death row for crimes they didnt commit ("Innocence Project"). So while the appeals are necessary, over all that time spent trying to make absolutely certain that a person should really be killed, the money is stacking up to cost millions of dollars. The cost of the death penalty in California has totaled over $4 billion since 1978: $1.94 billion--Pre-Trial and Trial Costs; $925 million--Automatic Appeals and State Habeas Corpus Petitions; $775 million--Federal Habeas Corpus Appeals; $1 billion--Costs of Incarceration. The authors calculated that, if the Governor commuted the sentences of those remaining on death row to life without parole, it would result in an immediate

savings of $170 million per year, with a savings of $5 billion over the next 20 years (Alarcon, and Mitchell). The best part of abolishing the death penalty is that no one has to be responsible for their death. No one has to worry that the person could actually be innocent. With all the unsurety about whether the death penalty is moral or not, its impossible to have a decent system for carrying it out. And it takes so much effort to do so that theres no way it can actually be worth it. The good news is that seventeen states and the District of Columbia have already banned the death penalty, and every year, fewer and fewer people are sentenced or killed. Many other countries have already abandoned it, and itd be in Americas best interest if we did too. The death penalty is very flawed, while its alternative, life in prison without chance of parole, is humane, relatively cheap, and more efficient. You dont have to wipe bananas off the planet in order to protect those who are allergic, so we ought to treat other people at least as well as our fruit.

Works Cited David , Von Drehle. "Death Penalty Walking." New York Times 14 Jan 2008, 39-41. Print. "Constitution of the United States: Bill of Rights." Yale Law School. Lillian Goldman Law Library, n.d. Web. 17 Jan 2013. <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rights1.asp> "The Innocent and the Death Penalty." Innocence Project. N.p.. Web. 17 Jan 2013. <http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/The_Innocent_and_the_Death_Penalty.php> Alarcon, Arthur, and Paula Mitchell. "Costs of the Death Penalty." Death Penalty Information Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan 2013. <http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-deathpenalty>