Troy Davis was executed on the 21st. There was a lot of talk around his case and a lot of people defending him. To counter that, there were those who said he got what he deserved. I don't think he got what he deserved because I don't believe anyone truly "deserves" the death penalty. If I was on a jury for the case of Stalin or Hitler, I would have serious trouble morally saying that these people should be executed by the state. That's just me and a majority of people in the U.S. favor death penalty over life in prison for very serious crimes, though it is only a slight majority. To me, the issue of capital punishment is too messy. Not everyone who has ever been executed is guilty and many execution we have carried out have been botched and the botching makes these executions seem very inhumane. There are three main areas to address when it comes to the death penalty, a pragmatic approach, a moral/ethical approach, and the approach of how humane/inhumane it is.
First of all, there is the pragmatic approach or the "bottom line approach". Lets approach the criminals just as burdens on society for the sake of argument (the government already does this). The general estimate of how much each death row inmate costs over their lifetime is 2-4 million dollars to the state. Yeah, that much. The average cost of an inmate in the united states is 24,000 per year or about 1.4 million at its worst (someone who gets life in prison at 18 and lives until 78). Where do the costs go? Well, first of all it costs 90,000 dollars a year to keep someone on death row and the average cost for a trial where the death penalty is involved is about 600k, 8 times more than a "life in prison case". This is not counting all the appeals that the prisoners are given. Yes, you can cut appeals costs, but that just makes the situation less human, but still costly. From a fiscal sense, its fiscally irresponsible to have capital punishment.
Lets take this from an ethical/moral approach. Is it right for federal government to have the power to end the lives of a citizen? To me, that doesn't sound like democracy. That sounds like a system where the citizens are subjects of the government and not a government "of the people" This quote: "Execution in America is far from common and used only for the most heinous crimes-- unlike the Chinese who find execution a simple method to rid themselves of a drugs problem, or Mr. Ahmadinijad who claims his country has 'no gays'." is from an article in the daily mail defending the Troy Davis and the execution. The problem with this is, do we want to be compared to a communist country who regulates google or a violent dictator? We are better than them, our rule of law guarantees some of the most freedoms to its citizens. The death penalty as a mode of crime has faded out because the ethical code people live by has changed. A map of the countries that still use it as a punishment show its basically the middle-east, 3rd world countries, communist countries/dictatorships, and us. Why do we want to be in the company of 3rd world countries and China? Its not good company and doesn't sit right with my ethics.
The death penalty is not humane. 350 people between 1900 and 1985 where found posthumously innocent based on new DNA evidence. Thats 4% of all executions. This kind of ties into ethics to but is it ethical/humane to execute 1 innocent person for 24 guilty ones? The rate has dropped because of DNA, but because eyewitness testimonies are often unreliable (and count for 50% of wrongful executions), there may be some wrongful executions that fall through the cracks and its hard to tell because whats the federal motivation to investigate? Troy Davis may be one of those cases because his case was based almost solely on eyewitness testimony. Another issue about Troy Davis was it was clear he had insufficient defense in his case. His legal team was not very good and that is the biggest factor in wrongful executions and defendents without high-paid legal teams are 2.5 times more likely to die. So we execute the poor and the innocent, whats next? Executions backfire and are far from humane. There is nothing humane about some of these executions. The worst may have been Romell Broom who "At one point, he covered his face with both hands and appeared to be sobbing, his stomach heaving" .
There is also the issue of a deterrent what people use. There are not statistics that truly even support a correlation that shows that more state executions mean less homicides. A vast majority of criminologists (~87%) do not believe it serves as an effective deterrent.
Even after all this, there is a serious problem with what constitutes a death penalty crime. Even if it stays, it should be for those most heinous that people against the death penalty often have to think twice about their opinions in the case. We are talking the Ted Kaszynski's and Charlie manson's of the world. A legal study by Pepperdine U school of law has called for greater transparencies in death penalty decisions and the decisions for prosecutors to apply the death penalty.
The questions about Davis to me remain: Was the death penalty applicable? Would he have gotten it if he was white and/or had adequate representation? Was he even guilty? These questions remain, but what has been affirmed is my belief of the negative effect on society that the death penalty has.
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