According to Jennifer Sullivan, a crime reporter who won a 2010 Pulitzer Prize, the difference in trials involving the death penalty and not involving the death penalty, is $1.06 million, with cases with the death penalty being more expensive. That’s not even including years of retrials, appeals, and waiting. After all of those trials, sometimes the court finds a convict not guilty. One example of this is Ray Hinton, a man who was wrongly convicted in 1985 and proceeded to spend the next 3 decades on death row for murders he did not commit. In that particular case, the state spent close to $30 million to ruin an innocent man’s life. There are other cases similar to this, and in some, the state has had to pay back the wrongly convicted person. This puts even more economic strain on the state government, and is another reason for the death penalty to be …show more content…
However, according to a study done by the Death Penalty Information Center, in 2013 states that did not have the death penalty had a 22% lower murder rate than states with the death penalty. As evidence of this, the death penalty should be changed or abolished to lower crime rates, which would keep some would-be criminals out of jail and off of death row. This cuts down on costs for the state, and by extension, the taxpayers. While many would argue that the possibility of being put on death row would scare many would-be criminals away from committing crimes and murders, due to that fact that it has been proven to have the opposite effect, the death penalty should be taken out of the judicial system to cut costs for state