The death penalty has been used for thousands of years, dating all the way back to Hammurabi’s Code in the 1700s BC, which is most known for its famous line, “an eye for an eye”. It is still in use today, and is the subject of much controversy for a few main reasons. One, some people question the ethics of killing someone. Two, it costs an average of $90,000 more per year per prisoner to keep a prisoner on death row as opposed to a normal jail, according to Rone Tempest, award-winning author of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, in Death Penalty Focus: The High Cost of the Death Penalty. This money comes from taxpayers, which is the main reason that the cost of the death penalty causes so much controversy. Another reason that
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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
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