History of Capital Punishment

History of Capital Punishment

In the history of the world, the punishment for murder, or homicide, has generally been “the death penalty”. This seems to be the most logical punishment. If someone intentionally kills an innocent human being, why should he be able to live? Or should he? Should he be forced to suffer for the remainder of his life for this terrible crime? There

are many arguments and opinions on this topic; many reasons why we should sentence murderers to death, but many reasons we should not.

One main reason we should not sentence these people to death is the cost. It simply costs too much to put people on death row. A gentleman in Texas quoted

estimates in two counties near his home. They both estimated the cost of a capital trial to

be $400,000 - $600,000 verses the cost of a non-capital trial, about $75,000. Then, 80%

of these trials result in appeals, costing the tax-payers more for simply the cost of housing

another criminal. At this point, the appeals court will invalidate about 30% of all

death sentences, leaving us with only a 50% chance this criminal will actually be

executed. (www.personalumich.com) The total cost we end up with is around $580,000

per execution. This is a substantially larger amount than we would pay for a criminal

sentenced to life in prison without parole. We can achieve the same goal with each

sentence: That this person will not murder anyone again. With the life sentence, we are

able to make these people suffer for the remainder of his life, for the crime he committed.

With the death sentence, the criminal gets off pretty easy; he dies and doesn’t have the

guilt on his conscience anymore. In Florida, a study was done showing each execution

averaged...

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...study there were 22,520 murders committed and only one execution (www.cwrl.utexas). This clearly shows the absence of crime deterrence.

Finally, before researching for this paper, I believed strongly in the death penalty, however, as most things in life, when we research and find out all the details, we may form another opinion. All money spent on these cases, could be well spent on something more rewarding, such as education. I do believe that if we are going to remain sentencing people to the death penalty, they should only be able to stay on death row a couple months, then we should decide if they will be executed, or have life in prison. If we chose death, it should then be done. No more criminals on death row for 20 years. I feel we should be sure and make informed decisions about something as important as this and I hope this paper allows you to do that.