Capital Punishment

FINAL SPEECH: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Meredith Scroggin

                                Imagine your own dad. He’s the man that you’ve idolized for your whole life, the one that has never stopped loving you, the one that’s provided with your ability to achieve what you’ve achieved. He’s the one that fed you when you were little and makes you feel better when you’re upset. He’s the one that you can’t even fathom losing because he’s just that special in your life. That man easily could’ve been Jonothon Hoffman. He was just a normal black man, convicted by an all-white jury of killing another white man. He was given an execution sentence and was going to have his life put to an end because of these charges. No physical evidence was ever linked to Hoffman killing the man, yet there were people still willing to kill him simply because they thought he committed this crime. Hoffman was on death row for 12 years, anxiously hoping that he would be granted a new trial due to the allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, where his cousin falsely testified against him for thousands of dollars. Had there not been someone to drop the charges for this innocent man, Hoffman would now be dead or still waiting for the time of his death to occur. Now though this may be cheesy, think about your dad again. Even if there was a chance that he might have killed someone, would you want someone to make the legal decision to end his life? To end life? Hoffman was someone’s son: there was a mother out there that knew that her son was going to be wrongly put to death. How are we still in favor of this malevolence? 

It seems like an easy thing to say that if we can kill those who kill others, there’ll be less killers in this world. Right? Not exactly. Many like to claim that capital punishment is an effective deterrent in the United States. Those people don’t really know how that ‘effective deterrent’ is really holding up. Research can statistically back up the fact that the death penalty does not deter crimes. We can look at these facts by analyzing and comparing crime rates and places where execution is legal. Between the years of 1974 and 2009, New York, California, and Texas have all had similar murder rates: they all increased until the 80s and then dramatically decreased. However, in that time period, Texas executed 447 people, California had 13, and New York? Zero executions for New York. So how is that people can propose the idea that the death penalty can really stop homicides from occurring? One can claim that there’s simply a correlation, not a causal incident. But there’s got to be some heck of a coincidental correlation for there to be such disparity. These patterns have even occurred between the United States and Canada. Since the 60s, the two countries have had virtually the same pattern of crime rates, never straying from each other. But when you hear that Canada has had no executions since 1962, does it change your mind about how ‘effective’ this so-called deterrent really is? And even during that time period right after the United States put the death penalty back into place in 1976, murder rates were still fairly high. I could go on with more statistics about the death penalty not being a deterrent, but for the heck of it, let’s look at statistics from people who think killing people is the right way to go. Some studies claim that for each execution, 3 to 18 murders can be prevented. But from Daniel Nagin, an expert in criminology and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, “The studies have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies conclude that executions save large numbers of lives; others conclude that executions actually increase homicides; and still others conclude that executions have no effect on homicide rate.” If there are such varying conclusions about these studies and their deterrent effects, why are they still considered valid? Even some of the nation’s leading criminologists- 88% at that, according to a study by Professor Michael Radelet and Traci Lacock of the University of Colorado- don’t believe that the death penalty is an effective deterrent. And 91% of those same criminologists said that politicians only support the death penalty to appear tough on crime, solely basing their opinions on empirical research. Maybe, somewhere along the way, the death penalty has the slight possibility of preventing a wacko from killing someone. But if someone has set out to commit a crime such as this, is the inevitable punishment, whether it be a life sentence or an execution, really stop them? Let’s reconsider the logic that those in favor of capital punishment have tried to lay out for us: the death penalty is NOT an effective deterrent.

You’ve got logic, and then you’ve got money. Regardless of the controversy how you feel about it being effective, you can’t ignore the cold, hard facts about the cold, hard cash involved. In California alone, capital punishment has cost the state four billion dollars since 1978. This cost includes the price of the two trials of deciding innocence, and then the trial of deciding the punishment, as well as the costs of appeals and protections for the defendants. Because California has only executed 13 people since 1978, that four billion can be divided into 308 million per execution over the years. Three hundred and eight million dollars was spent on killing one person. According to the California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice, capital punishment costs the state 137 million dollars per year, as opposed to the 11.5 million per year without the death penalty. And “the greatest costs associated with the death penalty occur prior to and during trial, not in post-conviction proceedings. Even if all post-conviction proceedings (appeals) were abolished, the death penalty would still be more expensive than alternative sentences”, according to Amnesty International. Having the death penalty even in existence takes away funds from programs that could prevent the need for it in the first place. Money saved from eliminating capital punishment could be used for better mental health treatment, drug treatment, education and awareness, and more money into the criminal justice system: all of these without having the death penalty even an option anymore.

                                All statistics and numbers and percentages aside, if the fact that capital punishment is expensive and useless hasn’t gotten to you about why the death penalty should be outlawed, let’s look at the humanity of our country. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re justifying killing. Not only justifying, but encouraging and supporting it. You can’t use people’s lives as statistics in how the rare possibility of killing someone can maybe prevent other lives. When it gets straight down to it, people’s lives are much more valuable than numbers on a slip of paper as to show why we should keep on killing criminals. Life is more worthy than an argument and simply can’t be viewed as a number. And if we’re trying to show that killing is wrong by killing, then we’re being quite hypocritical. We must be simply living in a hypocritical world if we’re trying to convince the people of our country to not kill and murder when we’re doing just the same! And even though I’ve barely scratched the surface of why we should eliminate this malevolence in our country, there are plenty of other reasons, ranging from the existing racism, to the inclination against poor people, and the fact that it’s simply a cruel and unusual punishment! It’s an ongoing, never ending cycle of death that needs to be stopped with the ban of the death penalty. Yes, that seems like an overwhelming, daunting task to just end the death penalty completely. But there are ways that such huge issues can become personal ones. Plenty of organizations, such as the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and Amnesty International, that work for the sole purpose of abolishing this corruption in the legal system. They raise awareness to the public about the facts on capital punishment and about cases that can be changed, they call press conferences, speak with and visit prisoners on death row, encourage support from former prisoners that they’ve freed. Joining these organizations and simply being aware of the real life situations in our lives dealing with this issue can be simple ways that we advocate the abolition of the death penalty.

Are we really better than the murderers themselves if we continue this? It’s the question that those in favor of the death penalty refuse to answer. What morals do we have by ending the lives of just one, if not more? By supporting the death penalty in our country, you’re supporting the end of life for a person, a real person, with family and friends and loved ones. What right and authority do we even have to take away their right to life?