The High Cost of the Death Penalty - Essay Example

The High Cost of the Death Penalty Introduction In 1972, the death penalty was stricken from the available tools of the prosecution in all states by the U. S. Supreme Court which decided that it was a form of punishment that was cruel and beyond that which was allowed by the United States Constitution. However, four years later that decision was reversed. During the time that it had become against the law to put an offender to death, there were 630 inmates that were given a life sentence. By 1999 there were 3500 men, 50 women, and an inclusion of 65 juveniles whose crimes had been committed before they turned 18, all sitting awaiting their execution within the United States. Thre had been 550 executions carried out since the reinstitution of the death penalty (Radelet and Borg 43). The death penalty is considered to be a method of deterrence, the primary reason for the argument for the death penalty in the 1970s centered on this debate. However, this has been denounced as a viable excuse for the death penalty as it is rarely considered as part of the cost/benefit internal discussion of an offender during the commission of a crime that would warrant a death penalty verdict. According to Radelet and Akers, as related in Radelet and Borg, “ in a recent survey of current and former presidents of three professional associations of criminologists (the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Law and Society Association), 85% of the experts agreed that the empirical research on deterrence has shown that the death penalty never has been, is not, and never could be superior to long prison sentences as a deterrent to criminal violence” (45). Therefore, deterrence is not a viable argument for the death penalty. The second argument for the death penalty is incapacitation. The theory of incapacitation is that in taking the life of an offender, society is safe from an consequential murders that will take place if a prison term is served and release is granted. However, offenders being released and repeating the act of murder is significantly low. Radelet and Akers relate that only about 1 percent of those whose prison sentences had been commuted from death to life in prison went on to commit a murder later on, and ironically, this figure turned out to be the same percentage of those 630 offenders who were discovered to be innocent of the crimes for which they had been originally sentenced to death (46). One way in which the death penalty provides context is in consideration of the nature of law and race relations. The statistics show that since the new laws have been put into place, the death penalty is far more likely to be put into place by an average of three to four times more often when the victim is white. There is a less bias when the offender is concerned, but more often it is within the racial nature of the victim (Radelet and Borg 48). The nature of law, unfortunately, has shown that race is a defining factor in the treatment of an offender, whether it be through their own race or through that of their victim. Because law is subjectively applied, race has an effect in the decisions of the judicial branch of government. In addition, it has been very rare that anyone of any means has been sentenced to death, making the death sentence relative to the poverty of the offender (Geraghty 209). However, the best argument that has come into existence, one that covers a vast number of issues in regard to the use of the death penalty as a punitive measure, is that concerning the financial costs of the issue. One of the reasons that is often given, by a factor of 11%, in support of the death penalty is because there is a belief that a death sentence is cheaper than supporting a life sentence of incarceration. However, the estimates in 1988 for the overall costs of an execution were 3.2 million, with it costing a mere 600,000 for life in prison (Radelet and Borg 50). While these figures are more than likely very different 20 years later, it is likely that the disparity in the costs are the same. Considering the Death Sentence In considering the death sentence, the nature of it is such that while it provides none of the factors that the public desires from the outcome of a punishment for a criminal, it creates all of the political emotion that politicians desire in order to help their campaigns. The emotional element can be summed up by this comment by Zimring and Johnson: “American …citizens fear violent crime and are both punitive and hostile in their attitudes towards persons who commit serious offences” (269). When considering the concept of crime, it must be understood that the criminal is seen as a predatory ‘other’, a person who does not reflect the same morals and ethics that the ‘law-abiding citizen’ understands. In placing the criminal as ‘other’, the opinion that is then placed into play is that the criminal would respond with restraint if the punishment reached a level of deterrence that was severe enough (Zimring and Johnson 271). One of the factors in determining the death sentence after conviction for the jury to consider is whether or not the offender will commit more violence within society. Because these inmates do not have the possibility of measurable recidivism rates, because they never leave prison and are killed for their crimes, there is no way to measure if the rate of this group of offenders is accurate in relationship to the perception of jurors who sentence a criminal to death for his actions. What statistics do show is that those inmates who are given a reprieve from their death sentence and spend the rest of their life behind bars show a significantly lower level of incarceration violence than do those who are given life sentences (Cunningham and Sorensen 568). Therefore, the sentence of life, and then the relief from that burden provides for a much more docile inmate. This, of course, creates a paradox in that to sentence a man to death who has committed the type of crime that calls for the death sentence puts an additional burden on the incarceration, whereas life in prison opens up the opportunity that an inmate has to lower his level of caring about the nature of his incarceration as he has no hope for relief from the circumstances of his life. In other words, from the beginning he has nothing to lose. Therefore, his actions reflect that from of an existential attitude. Death Row Death Row is the name that is given to the section of the prison in which those inmates who have been condemned to death are housed. Most of these offenders are placed in ‘supermax’ prisons in which they are locked down in virtual solitary confinement awaiting the time for their execution. The nature of death row is that it takes a very long time from the point of sentencing until all appeals processes have run their course and the actual execution takes place. There are many issues with this process. A death sentence only requires that the jury be convinced there is no reasonable doubt of guilt, not that the evidence be irrefutable, thus there is some speculation to the nature of the death penalty as in it does not allow for the eventual truth to have impact on the release of a prisoner who is put to death. Vindication may come after death, which can be a real problem. As well, the long time that it takes between sentencing and carrying out that sentence often is considered to be cruel and unusual punishment, the convicted feeling the weight of impending death for years, the anxiety eating away at the soul of the convicted. Despite the ideologies about the death sentence, death row, rather than execution, is perhaps societies worst punishment. In considering the nature of punishment a contractualist theory can provide context for how a punishment is mete out by the state. According to Brettschneider, the contractualist theory looks at punishment from the point of view of how the punishment serves the people rather than how it serves to punish (194). This point of view seems to negate the idea of the concept of punishment as it is relative to crime. It is intended to placate the public, rather than to be effective as a measure of criminal management. This can be further proved through the nature of the way in which the death penalty is argued. According to Miller and Bornstein, “a religious appeal has been used to persuade jurors” and was effective in “the trial of Andrea Yates, the mother who drowned her five children in her bathtub” (675). The emotional factor works in favor of offenders or against them, depending on how sympathy can be framed, which is often framed through that of the religious feelings of the jurors in comparison to their emotional feelings against the offender. The subjectivity negates arguments for the death penalty because it is not given out through objective consideration, but through emotional turmoil as it is framed by the lawyers to the jury. Whoever argues more effectively wins the case, which is not about justice, but about how the public contracts with the system to serve their needs. The consideration of the length of time that it takes to navigate the judicial system once someone has been sentenced to death has been addressed in Indian courts. The country of India has instituted a two year maximum in which the sentence must be carried out, or it is automatically commuted to life in prison. This maximum can even be breached by the efforts of the defendant to seek appeals, but if after two years the defendant has not seen his sentence carried out, the nature of political belief within that nation is that two years is long enough and that any longer constitutes unreasonable cruelty to the individual (Lakshman and Natarajan). The nature of the idea of spending years waiting for a death penalty to be carried out is such that it adversely affects the individual to the point that it requires attention. Inmates on death row are treated in such a manner that they are in “an austere world in which condemned prisoners are treated as bodies kept alive to be killed” (Tonry 752). The are usually in confinement for twenty-two hours a day and not in a general population. Before the 1960s when for a brief period of time the death penalty was abolished in the United States, the average length of time spent on death row was 16 months. In 1995, the average time spent on death row after it was reinstituted as a legal form of punishment was eleven years. Tonry uses the example of an inmate from Utah who, after spending 18 years on death row for a crime that he committed when he was 19 was finally given his death (752). The topic is such that the international stage feels that the method of punishment as it is practiced in the United States is such that it violates our own constitutional law and is cruel, inhumane and degrading for the convicted. The feelings are powerful enough that in 1989 the United Kingdom refused to extradite a person who was being considered for the death penalty in Virginia on the grounds that the verdict would be inhumane and the nation could not support the potential of such a verdict (Tonry 752). The Cost of the Death Penalty The first cost of having the death penalty is in determining how it positions the United States on the global political stage. Of all executions in the world, 90% of them happen within China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States (Hessing, de Keijser, and Effers 605). Of these four countries, the United States claims a very different ideology in comparison to the other three. This places the United States in a position of vulnerability where the ‘enlightenment’ of democracy is used to defend those whose ideologies of political structure comes in conflict with basic humanitarian concepts. The United States shows a provable association with countries who have less than stellar reputations with human rights issues. The second way that the death penalty costs the public is through the costs that are involved in the legal system and the appeals process that must take place to ensure that those who have been convicted have been given all possible fairness in their legal event, thus providing the closest possible conclusion to the issue of guilt or innocence. This, of course, does not always work. However, the financial investment that the American taxpayer makes towards taking the life of an offender is much higher than those costs of incarcerating him for the rest of his life. According to a study done in Indiana, “the costs in death penalty cases exceed the total cost of life without parole by more than a third” (Gerber and Johnson 220). The myth that promotes the idea that death is a more efficient form of punishment provides over ten percent of those who support the death penalty with a reason for that support (Radelet and Borg 50). However, the facts do not support this theory. Another cost of the death penalty is that in the time and effort that goes into supporting the needs of a death penalty process, will actually “divert financial and human resources away from effective crime fighting strategies, so that in the end, the pursuit of death diminishes rather than augments the human and financial resources available for realistic crime fighting” (Gerber and Johnson 220). The problem with pursuing the death penalty is that it consumes the public, the nature of the crime creating a spectacle that takes away from the needs to address other issues in regard to the public safety. The nature of a capital crime will hold the attention of the public so that all other problems fade into the background. When that amount of time consumes the public interest, other crimes can become lost in the glimmer of its celebrity. Conclusion The nature of emotionalism in the court system provides for a structure that is unfairly adjudicated and subjectively administered. The concept of mercy, while benevolent and a concept associated with enlightenment, ends with the unfair use of penalties through a system that provides those with better ‘theater’ through lawyers advantages that those with lesser ‘theater’ cannot meet (Sigler 339). Through the emotions of the event of a trial and the public and political system through which it is influenced, the nature of justice is lost through the administration of a penalty that targets the poor and is unevenly used in favor of ’white’ victims. The costs to the public is through an illusion that is perpetrated upon them that the death penalty provides some sort of security. In a more practical vein, the financial costs to the taxpayer is represented in the higher costs that a death penalty case will create in comparison to those that a life in prison case will present. The taxpayer is heavily penalized for something that is ’sexy’, that titillates and provides a public discourse mythology of the idea of a system that is working for the benefit of the public in getting criminals off of the street. In addition, the problem of the attention of law enforcement and the legal system as it must navigate the costs that a death penalty case will incur and the costs in human resources that cannot address the needs of other criminal issues steals from the public the safety that they are in such need to have at their disposal . The death penalty does nothing to serve the public other than through the mythologies that exist in providing security. The costs are simply to high to justify the illusion of benefits. Works Cited Brettschneider, Corey. The Rights of the Guilty: Punishment and Political Legitimacy. Pollitical Theory. 35.2 (Apriil 2007): 175-199. Print. Cunningham, Mark Douglas ad Jon R. Sorensen. Capital Offenders in Texas Prisons: Rates, Correlates, and an Actuarial Analysis of Violent Misconduct. Law and Human Behavior. 31.6 (December 2007): 553-571. Print. Geraghty, Thomas F. Review: Trying to Understand America’s Death Penalty System and Why We Still Have it. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. 94.1 (Autumn 2003): 175-199. Gerber, Rudolph J, and John M. Johnson. The Top Ten Death Penalty Myths: The Politics of Crime Control. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2007. Print. Hessing, Dick J., Jan W. de Keijser, and Henk Effers. Explaining Capital Punishment Support in an Abolitionist Country: The Case of the Netherlands. Law and Human Behavior. 27.6 (December 2003): 605-622. Print. Lakshman, Ananth and Sarayu Natarajan. Capital Punishment: The Question of ‘Delay’. Economic and Political Weekly. 39.38 (September 18-24, 2004): 4216-4217. Print. Marzilli, Alan. Capital Punishment. New York: Chelsea House, 2008. Print. Miller, Monica K. and Brian H. Bornstein. The Use of Religion in Death Penalty Sentencing Trials. Law and Human Behavior. 30.6 (December 2006): 675-684. Print. Radelet, Michael L. and Marian J. Borg. The Changing Nature of Death Penalty Debates. Annual Review of Sociology. 26 (2000): 43-61. Print. Sigler, Mary. The Story of Justice: Retribution, Mercy, and the Role of Emotions in the Capital Sentencing Process. Law and Philosophy. 19.3 (May 2000). 339-367. Print. Tonry, Michael. The Handbook of Crime & Punishment. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000. Print. Zimring, Franklin E. and David T. Johnson. Public Opinion and the Governance of Punishment in Democratic Political Systems. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 605 (May 2006): 266-280. Print. Read More