Death Penalty Good Or Bad

The death penalty is a controversial topic throughout the United States. When convicted of a capital crime, a criminal has a chance to be sentenced to death if the crime was committed in one of the 31 states that offer this lethal sentence (States With and Without the Death Penalty, 2015). While most people argue that the death penalty is the right thing to do if someone commits such a heinous crime, or that without it it would cost much more to house these criminals for life, I disagree. Though intended to punish people, the death penalty may be doing more harm than good. With the first execution performed in 1608, the death penalty was brought to America by the Europeans. Most of the colonies had their own laws for what was punishable by …show more content…
Soon after, some states began to get rid of this punishment while others actually extended the number of crimes that could be sentenced to death, mainly states with slavery. As time progressed to the twentieth century, many states who had abolished the death penalty reinstated it when new execution methods developed and eager criminologists stressed it was needed in America. With the United States moving forward in terms of capital punishment, most of America’s allies had removed the death penalty by the 1950’s and only 42% of the population favored it (Part 1: History of the Death Penalty, n.d.). This led to many doubts on the humanity of the punishment, and it was said to be cruel and unusual. The Supreme Court began to change the ways death was given, and throughout the next thirty or so years the court had given the power to the states to write their own death penalty statutes to rid the problems associated with the question of constitutionality and problems of crimes (Part 1: History of the Death Penalty, …show more content…
In Texas, it’s $47.50 to keep a prisoner behind bars for twenty-four hours. If the inmate was sheltered for a span of forty-years, it would cost $693,500. Again, this is just the cost to bunk this prisoner. From the time a death row inmate receives the sentence to their execution date with court costs by themselves, it is an nearly $1.2 million dollars. Some argue that if the length of the appeals could be shortened, then the death penalty would not cost as much, but research says the cost of the first trial is always more expensive in death cases. When you factor in the multiple lawyers appointed to the case, the cost continues to stack up, as well as the fact that cases are almost always retried several times (Carver, 2009). It makes sense to think that killing someone convicted of a capital offense would be cheaper, but these inmates must go through a much more length process to be certain they are guilty and provided fair