Death Penalty In America Book Report

With the death penalty comes the expense of it. Why should the Department of criminal justice pay millions of dollars on one execution when the person who will be executed more than likely didn’t spend any money on the person that they killed? The justice departments have been using the defense that the death penalty will help to cut back on crime and use it as a deterrent effect, but in reality it does little to actually change the amount of crimes that are being committed. The book, Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies talks about how one of politicians main focuses now when discussing crime and the effects of it on the community is that they “worry about appearing soft on crime”. When determining if the death penalty is an efficient …show more content…
As the costs of the death penalty varies from state to state and even between different counties the taxpayers are still the sole providers to how the counties can even afford the option of pursuing the death penalty. The Dallas County District Attorney, Norman Kinne says, ‘”If you can be satisfied with putting a person in the penitentiary for the rest of his life…I think we have to be satisfied with that as opposed to spending $1 million to try and get them executed.”’ Kinne, makes a plausible point as he argues that although morally one might have stronger feelings about ‘eye for an eye’ and doing to one what they’ve done to others; in the long run it is more cost effective to just lock them away in the penitentiary than to waste taxpayer dollars on one trial that might not even end up with the outcome originally pursued. While most of the costs that accumulate from these kinds of cases are from the trials themselves, the process of appeals that the offenders get if they are sentenced the death penalty takes a serious toll on not only the financial aspect of the government, but the time it takes to go through that