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Essays on what religion says about the death penalty
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The Death Penalty: Killing to Show Killing is Wrong
Everyone knows that killing is wrong. So why should the government be able to kill people in order to show the population that killing is wrong? The answer is: they shouldn’t. Capital punishment is hypocritical and should no longer be given out as a sentence. The death penalty is immoral and should be abolished due to its high costs, its ability to give the criminals an “easy way out,” it leaves too much room for error, and most importantly, it goes against God’s way of a natural death. As it is stated best in the Bible, “There is only one lawgiver and judge, He who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?” (King James Bible, James 4:12).
A common misconception with the death penalty is that people think it costs less than to keep the convicted in prison for life. This is not true. The sentence of a death penalty is much more expensive due to the long and complex judicial process required by the Constitution. Giving the sentence of “life without parole” or “life in prison” saves millions of dollars that could be used on other programs and eliminates the risk of wrongful execution. A large example of just how expensive the death penalty is found in the state of California, who could save $1 billion over the course of 5 years by simply replacing the death penalty with life imprisonment. California, since reinstating the sentence of capital punishment, has spent over $4 billion on prisoners on death row; over $338 million on each prisoner (Death Penalty: The High Cost of the Death Penalty). Eliminating the death penalty means saving money, which is something our country needs right now.
Most families of murder victims will wish ill upo...
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... is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord,” (Romans 12:19). The Bible is saying that we, as humans, shouldn’t kill anyone or know when someone will die. Only God, who knows everything, should know when a person will die. It isn’t natural for someone to anticipate when they will die and dread the day when it will come. God rules over us; we don’t rule over us.
The death penalty is an unnecessary punishment. There are no benefits to killing a criminal who committed an awful crime. The state/country loses money, the criminals get an easy way out of their situation, people can be wrongly executed (which is irreversible), and it goes against God’s will of a natural death. These are all negative things that the death penalty brings about. For these reasons, the death penalty should be abolished for all states and all countries around the world.
Even the worst crimes should not be paid with the simple escape of death. The death penalty costs far more than a life sentence, though it seems like the opposite would be true. With the multiple appeals and trials and relocations, it’s millions down the drain. According to deathpenalty.org it costs taxpayers $90,000 more a year to maintain a death row prisoner versus maintaining a prisoner in general population. Add in the cost of execution depending on the method, $24 million for each electrocution in Florida, at least $86 per lethal injection, around $25,000 for a fire squad execution,(deathpenaltyinfo.org) and it’s even more for a quick end.
Notwithstanding issues of morality, the death penalty process of California is financially inefficient and ineffective. At the current rate of executions, “it would take 1,600 years to execute everybody on death row.” [The Death of the American Death Penalty, 122] The average delay in implementing a death sentence calculates out to be 25 years, at an added cost of $90,000 per year over normal incarceration. [Guy, 2] This is a “premium that currently totals more than $60 million a year” [Guy, 2]. When you take the added costs of death row incarceration and total them up with the additional costs of prosecution and the handling of the many legal appeals death row inmates are entitled to, the unnecessary amount of spending is significant. We could eliminate “$126 million a year” in additional costs by simply sentencing death row inmates to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. [Guy, 2] Because of the afo...
Unlike popular belief, the cost of sentencing someone to death is actually more expensive than a life sentence in prison. In Washington, since the death penalty was reinstated 5 people have been put to death costing taxpayers roughly $120 million, that's roughly $24 million per case (Seattle University, 2015). A reason that people advocate strongly for the death penalty is because they believe that they should not have to pay for the costs to keep criminals fed, sheltered and imprisoned. In fact, 56% of Canadians surveyed believed that the one time cost of a lethal injection is cheaper and will allow their money to go towards something more advantageous like healthcare or education (Angus Reid). This is actually quite different from the truth, in fact is estimated that it costs $740 000 on average to put someone in prison for life. It is also estimated that it costs roughly $1.26 million to sentence someone to death (Seattle University, 2015). (There seems to be a discrepancy between how much a single case costs and how much Washington spent since the death penalty has been reinstated, but I could not find evidence to why that is). Among the reasons why the death penalty is so expensive is the fact that the time in courts is quite lengthy. Jury trials averaged 40.13 days in cases where the death penalty was being sought, but only 16.79 days
Cases in which the death penalty is gone after are more expensive and take more time to solve than non capital cases. “Even when a trial wasn’t necessary, those cases where the death penalty was sought still cost about twice as much as those where death was not sought” (Erb 1). The added money is due to legal representation, enhanced security for death row, and the costs it takes to go through the motions of a trial such as this. "The additional cost of confining an inmate to death row, as compared to the maximum security prisons where those sentenced to life without possibility of parole ordinarily serve their sentences, is $90,000 per year per inmate” (The Death Penalty 8). With California’s current death row (670) this would generate $63.3 million dollars per year. This is important because it shows factual stats about how much these cases cost vs regular cases and how much money could be saved if the death penalty was eliminated. These statistics show my thesis is correct because the high costs are one of the reasons why the death penalty might be
At approximately 9:30PM on May 13, 1981, Bobby Grant Lambert was robbed and killed while walking out of a Safeway in Houston, Texas. The man who was convicted of this crime was an innocent African American by the name of Gary Graham, who was 17 years of age at the time. While there was no fingerprint or DNA evidence that linked Graham to the crime, he was still convicted of the crime due to claims of one out of five witnesses. All of the other four witnesses did not think it was Graham , but Bernadine Skillern was certain that it was him. She was the only witness at the trial and had made outrageous claims. Although she was in her car roughly 30-40ft away from the scene when she caught a slight glimpse of the assailant’s face, she claimed that she remembered his face very clearly. This, however, is very improbable because even if she were able to see anything clearly from that distance, it would be very unlikely for her to distinguish and remember a person’s face at night in a poorly lit parking lot. Unfortunately,
Costs vary ranging from an additional twenty-five thousand dollars to as high as One million dollars. This is astronomical coming from a nation in debt. We either need to figure out a way that allows the people save money on putting people to death who break society 's rules then leech money away or we need to stop it all together. This would be the only logical reason to prevent the death penalty from being implemented, but as shown above there are lackluster aspects to the system. Even when a decision is made our government doesn’t take the best coarse of action when trying to follow through on the
The cost of the death penalty is extraordinary. California has spent more than $4 billion administering the death penalty since 1978, or more than $300 million per person for each of the 13 people who have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated. Conversely, it costs approximately $200,000 to $300,000 to convict and sentence an individual to life without the possibility of parole. If those sentenced to death received life sentences instead, we accomplish the same deterrent effect of the death penalty: criminals remain off the streets for the rest of their lives. The money saved could be spent on improving the criminal justice system such as increasing
The United States has a long history with the death penalty. The “first recorded execution was in Jamestown in 1608” (“Death Penalty in America” 259). Since then, thirty five states have continued to use the death penalty. Now it can be considered a normal punishment and many people feel strongly about it, but maybe we should forget what we have done in the past and take a second look. The death penalty should not be used in the United States because it is too expensive, affects the poor and minorities more than others, and (even though many people think it is true) the death penalty does not deter crime.
The death penalty is much more expensive than life without parole because the Constitution requires a long and complex judicial process for capital cases. If the death penalty was replaced with a sentence of Life Without the Possibility of Parole, which costs millions less and also ensures that the public is protected while eliminating the risk of an mistake, the money saved could be spent on programs that actually improve the communities in which we live. Scientific studies have consistently failed to demonstrate that executions deter people from committing crime anymore than long prison sentences. Moreover, states without the death penalty have much lower murder rates. The South accounts for 80% of US executions and has the highest regional murder rate (Death Penalty
Many people, including some higher educated people, tend to believe that executing someone is a lot cheaper than the alternative, which is life in prison without the possibility of parole. Indeed, this thought seems like common sense. However, extensive research has been conducted that contradicts that belief. For instance, a study conducted in Maryland, in 2008, found that the state spends roughly 1.9 million dollars more per capital case, compared to non-capital cases (Warden, 2009). But how can this be some may ask. Well, the reason capital punishment costs more than life without the possibility of parole, is because death penalty cases are longer and more expensive. Because the capital punishment is an irreversible sentence, the state, or government, is required to heighten the defendant’s due process in order to decrease the chance of the defendant being innocent (DPIC). Furthermore, not only is it more expensive for the trial phase, it is also a higher price for a state to imprison death row inmates compared to other
Almost all nations in the world either have the death sentence or have had it at one time. It was used in most cases to punish those who broke the laws or standards that were expected of them. Since the death penalty wastes tax money, is inhumane, and is largely unnecessary it should be abolished in every state across the United States. The use of the death penalty puts the United States in the same category as countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia which are two of the world’s worst human rights violators (Friedman 34). Lauri Friedman quotes, “Executions simply inject more violence into an already hostile American society.”
The death penalty is racist, it punishes the poor, it causes the innocent to die, it is not a deterrent against violent crime, and it is cruel and unusual punishment. More than half of the countries in the world have already abolished the death penalty and the U.S should abolish it too. It is wrong and cruel. Some states in the U.S still hold the death penalty because they think it will keep U.S citizens safe, but we can just keep the murders in a separate patrolled jail. Abolish it and we may save the lives of the people that may have been executed innocent.
The first reason why death penalty should be allowed and get more active is life sentence is costly. According to “What is the Average Cost to House Inmates in Prison”, the average cost of housing an inmate in the U.S. was $31,286 in 2012 for per year. According to the “Who, what, where and why”, the United States has roughly 2.4 million people in prisons. Therefore, the money which America pays to keep prisoners who are in prisons is about $75120000000 for per year.
If a criminal is sentenced to life in jail, then the cost of their imprisonment would be many times this. In the USA, the average cost per prisoner annually in jail is $29,000. The cost of the drugs used for the lethal injection is believed to be $86.08. This is far less than the cost of keeping a prisoner in jail, and would save the government money that could be used to try and make the community a better and safer place. Secondly, many believe that capital punishment is right because of the justice given to the victim’s family.
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is how the saying goes. Coined by the infamous Hammurabi’s Code around 1700 BC, this ancient expression has become the basis of a great political debate over the past several decades – the death penalty. While the conflict can be whittled down to a matter of morals, a more pragmatic approach shows defendable points that are far more evidence backed. Supporters of the death penalty advocate that it deters crime, provides closure, and is a just punishment for those who choose to take a human life. Those against the death penalty argue that execution is a betrayal of basic human rights, an ineffective crime deterrent, an economically wasteful option, and an outdated method. The debate has experienced varying levels of attention over the years, but has always kept in the eye of the public. While many still advocate for the continued use of capital punishment, the process is not the most cost effective, efficient, consistent, or up-to-date means of punishment that America could be using today.