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“To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.” This quote is from Desmond Tutu, and speaks the absolute truth. The ideal that execution is the answer on how to deal with murderers is antiquated and extreme. Abolishing the death penalty is the wisest decision Americans can make due to its biased nature and costliness.
Some perks are included with the death penalty, those perks being that it eases overpopulation in prisons, deters some premeditated crimes, and provides closure for families. However, the death penalty is extremely expensive. Legal cases not dealing with the death penalty generally cost around $740,000, while death penalty cases cost around $1.26 million. Maintaining each death row prisoner costs taxpayers $90,000 more per year than a prisoner in the general population. California abolished the death penalty in 2014, but not before spending $4 billion on their “justice.” $4 billion sounds like a large amount of money, but a grand total of 13 prisoners were …show more content…
Very often the police and prosecutors make arrests and assumptions while overlooking evidence that points in another direction. An excellent example of this is the case of Madison Hobley, who supposedly killed his wife and child by lighting his apartment on fire. He was shocked, suffocated, burned, and beaten into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. The truth only came out in 2002, when it was revealed that the jury who sentenced him was intimidated by the police and the gas canister Hobley used was actually planted at the crime scene. Hobley is just one of the 86 on death row who have been wrongfully executed. Why would we, as Americans, keep a system that ignores evidence and beats their scapegoats into
“To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.” This quote is from Desmond Tutu, and speaks the absolute truth. The ideal that execution is the answer on how to deal with murderers is antiquated and extreme. Abolishing the death penalty is the wisest decision Americans can make due to its biased nature and costliness.
Some perks are included with the death penalty, those perks being that it eases overpopulation in prisons, deters some premeditated crimes, and provides closure for families. However, the death penalty is extremely expensive. Legal cases not dealing with the death penalty generally cost around $740,000, while death penalty cases cost around $1.26 million. Maintaining each death row prisoner costs taxpayers $90,000 more per year than a prisoner in the general population. California abolished the death penalty in 2014, but not before spending $4 billion on their “justice.” $4 billion sounds like a large amount of money, but a grand total of 13 prisoners were …show more content…
Very often the police and prosecutors make arrests and assumptions while overlooking evidence that points in another direction. An excellent example of this is the case of Madison Hobley, who supposedly killed his wife and child by lighting his apartment on fire. He was shocked, suffocated, burned, and beaten into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. The truth only came out in 2002, when it was revealed that the jury who sentenced him was intimidated by the police and the gas canister Hobley used was actually planted at the crime scene. Hobley is just one of the 86 on death row who have been wrongfully executed. Why would we, as Americans, keep a system that ignores evidence and beats their scapegoats into