The High Cost of Capital Punishment

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All across the United States of America, police officers are unfortunately, due to the lack of funding, being laid off, prisoners are being set free, the court systems are being bombarded with cases and the overall crime rate in this country continues to climb higher and higher despite our efforts to lower it. Since the economic crisis in 2008 resulting in our country falling into a recession, the criminal justice system has been forced to make cuts all the way to the very foundation. Many states throughout America were forced to release a large number of their prisoners early because of a lack of funding. For example the State of Florida released over 2500 of their inmates due to the budget crises caused by the recession. The State of Texas has been allowing convicted criminals to serve less than fifty percent of their sentence because the state simply can’t afford to keep them behind bars any longer. These same states are sinking millions of dollars into the death penalty every year. It has been shown in many cases that the cost of a death penalty case is much greater than that of a life without parole case. One such case comes out of a study that was done in Colorado that concluded that capital proceedings on average require one hundred and twenty three more days than a life without parole case. (Marceau, 2013) This case also noted that it takes about two days to select a jury for a life without parole case while it takes about 30 days to select a jury for a capital case. All together the proceedings for a life without parole case takes around days while the proceedings for a capital case takes nearly 4 years to conduct. Since 1978 the state of California alone has spent nearly four billion dollars in order to carry out the d...

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... therefore backup the court system in the United States of America. In conclusion the death penalty is too expensive and time consuming to carry out in order to effectively prevent the general public from committing murder and other violent acts associated with it.

Works Cited

Capital punishment. (n.d.). Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. Retrieved October 29, 2013, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/capital punishment
J. Marceau and H. Whitson, “The Cost of Colorado’s Death Penalty,” 3 Univ. of Denver Criminal Law Review 145 (2013)).
Murder. (n.d.). Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved October 29, 2013, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/murder
State of California. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Capital Punishment. CA.gov. 28 Oct. 2013

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