After decades of moral arguments reaching biblical proportions, after long, twisted journeys to the nation’s highest court and back, the death penalty may be abandoned by several states for a reason having nothing to do with right or wrong:
Money.
Turns out, it is cheaper to imprison killers for life than to execute them, according to a series of recent surveys. Tens of millions of dollars cheaper, politicians are learning, during a tumbling recession when nearly every state faces job cuts and massive deficits.
[…]
“It’s a waste of time and money,” said [Donald McCartin, a former California jurist known as “The Hanging Judge of Orange County”] the 82-year-old, self-described right-wing Republican whose sonorous voice still commands attention. “The only thing it does is prolong the agony of the victims’ families.”
[…]
The most recent arguments against it centered on the ever-increasing number of convicts cleared by DNA evidence.
[…]
“It’s all about money,” said McCartin, the former California judge. “The reasons I changed my mind were between that and how the victims’ families just get raped during appeals.”
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Fine with me. As I have said before, there is no logical or rational reason left to continue having a death penalty.
Every argument in favor of it are logical fallacies: Fallacies of tradition, or fallacies of emotion.
Lock em up and throw away the key!
Counter intuitive but if it’s cheaper to keep them behind bars, then that’s the way to go.
A system where they can work or provide for some form of restitution should also be employed.
– No work = no TV.
– 4 hrs work = 4 hrs TV or outdoor time
– etc
I think we need to do like in the John Carpenter classic Escape from New York. Turn Manhattan into a giant prison, most of the worse crooks are already there anyways. Send all the worst criminals there, and nobody gets out, ever.
#3–amodedoma==right you are but a bit broad brush. We should just drop the worst of the worst off at Bernie Madoffs apartment. Open the door, throw the creeps in there, lock the door. Restore the dignity of home arrest.
#4–Alfie==good one as usual. Keep the fantasy alive.
I think the argument will morph as the death penalty goes away. If its even worse to stick a convicted killer in solitary for killing a prison guard==won’t that also cause endless appeals?
No==the answer is a legal system that is appropriately quick and sure. Most of the valid complaints about the death penalty could be fixed with changes in the law. Won’t happen===but it could.
Down with for-profit prison systems/legal systems.
#6 Leave it to shallow minds to jump to the ridiculous and extreme. Let’s pick something. How about clearing the highways of litter for TV time?
Is that better for you or you can’t get you head out of your prison labor fantasy? Maybe highway litter is a job you aspire to.
Further sissification of our society.. our soldiers cant kill our enemies due to the UN, Geneva Convention, collateral damage what not…
and now we cant kill our criminals…
How I wish we had Genghis Khan leading the United States…. so much fun!
#10 Another one jumps to the extreme. Who said anything about murderers?
Should restitution not be part of justice? Is jail not punishment anymore?
It must be Sunday or something.
#10 Actually, on second thought. You are right. I veered off into general prison confinement and noted the article is about death penalty on capital crimes.
You are right and my apologies.
The best way to handle is, sentence them all to death and send then to France. France LOVES to shelter US murderers sentenced to death. This would be cheap, effective & humane.
Civilized countries don’t engage in pre-meditated killing.
That’s the beginning and end of it for me.
#1 ArianeB:
A good logical reason for the death penalty is to kill people we think shouldn’t exist. Like child molesters.
Makes sense to me.
That’s been my main objection for a long, long time. Why should the state seek revenge when it’s cheaper to throw the convicted behind bars for life. I don’t need revenge for someone being killed who I never met. I’d rather only pay for incarceration. If I DID know the victim then I want closure quickly and the death penalty takes a dozen years or more for that. Life behind bards offers the survivors closure sooner. The death penalty is for small minds and non-pragmatists.
But seriously folks, while it’s perfectly clear that there are those who pose a serious threat to society and therefore should have no place in it, our justice system is flawed and a very small percentage of people are wrongly convicted. Maybe it’s better not to kill.(PERIOD) Justice should be a way for society to protect itself from the negative human potential, not a means to avenge wrongful death or other heinous crimes.
BS! The “handling” of capital punishment is what costs more. The execution itself doesn’t cost anywhere near what life imprisonment cost. Not by orders of magnitude. Anyone who believes that is just kidding themselves. For sickos who admittedly torture, abuse or kill children, they should keep the death penalty and eliminate appeals. There’s no cure for those folks. None. Any psychologist who’s dealt with them will tell you that. If they need someone to throw the switch, I’ll be glad to volunteer. I’ll sleep like a baby.
#18 There is no death penalty for child molesting in the US.
The general “justice” argument can only be made if the death penalty were given for EVERY capital crime.
Instead, guilty people are more likely to plea bargain to not get the death penalty, and innocent are going to insist on their innocence all the way to death row, hence the large number of death row inmates that are exonerated.
But it is not just that. Men are far more likely to get the death penalty for the same crimes as women, minorities are far more likely to get the death penalty than whites.
Bottom line the death penalty is FAR FROM JUST!!
As long as we can abrogate justice in consideration of the savings of $, it can also be done with respect to the outrageous any-amount-it-takes attitude re $ spent on trials and lawyers – the underlying basis for this blog item.
There are plenty of arguments for execution, not the least is lessening the pain of the victim’s families. (In Canada the families of a mass child murder gets the “pleasure” of continually hearing from Clifford Olsen as he works the system and the media.)
But the only reason you need for executions is that it prevents killers from escaping and again killing innocent people as they do from time to time.
That it costs more to put down killers than house them speaks volumes about the criminal inefficiencies of the system. Fix that first.
“The most recent arguments against it centered on the ever-increasing number of convicts cleared by DNA evidence.”
Sorry, that supports the death penalty as we can finally execute with an extremely high degree of confidence.
RBG
I should first state that I’m not American, and not in favour of the Death Penalty. However, I’m surprised that no-one’s yet pointed out that this conclusion is specific to the USA, and is derived from factors that do not exist in other countries that have the death penalty.
In the USA, a prisoner sentenced to death is not executed immediately, but spends YEARS on “Death Row”, a prison department that costs more to run per prisoner, and then there are the legal activities (appeals etc.), which cost the state a lot too. The article describes the 20-year figure for California, and the costs, but I don’t imagine that the government of Singapore would recognise those cost disparities. 8-(
Re: #4, Alfredi said,“I see the lack of common sense glaringly evident in arguments against intelligent design…it is elementary, a building requires a builder, otherwise no building appears… “
Well you had better find some common sense for yourself then, because the last time I looked it was people building buildings, not a god. And the raw materials you call Earth were made in the bowels of our sun through a process called fusion.
Re: #19, And then Alfredi said “My trust God is, a reasoned conclusion achieved after critical evaluation of the facts, is irrelevant to our discussion. “
So why did you bring it up then? Since you did, what was your critical evaluation and reasoned conclusion of the fact that the story of Jesus is over 5000 years old and it’s original script was just a story?
And finally, being an intelligently designed Christian hypocrite, I see that “thou shalt not kill” has a carefully “reasoned” exception for you, to allow for your animal instincts. How convenient.
My opinion on the story… we should cut back on how much we spend on incarceration. Everyone should share the burden, including those serving time. Regarding the death penalty, even with DNA, it can still be circumstantial evidence. For instance, an accused may have had consensual sex with the victim, but someone else shot her 20 minutes later. On the other hand, what is more cruel… putting an innocent person in jail for 25 years to life, or ending their life in a blink?
#19, Alphie,
b)No one said restitution is not PART of justice…the argument is life in relatively comfortable prison is NOT justice for those murdered.
Then you don’t know or understand Justice.
1)Prison is not a comfortable experience. If it was then people would not be trying NOT to go to prison.
2)There are two parts of Justice, the criminal and the civil. Criminal Justice is punishing those who break our laws. Civil Justice deals with those who have financially injured others. Confusing the two too often leads to injustice.
c)I didn’t argue jail is not punishment of any sort…I argued its NOT physical punishment of the sort inflicted upon the victim. Indeed, the courts have ruled out physical punishments in prison.
Why should it be physical punishment?
d)My trust God is, a reasoned conclusion achieved after critical evaluation of the facts, is irrelevant to our discussion. Your reference to “Sunday” then a crude device to evade the facts of the argument…and any reasoned discussion…
The very thing you accuse others of, you practice….an Obama voter no doubt.
“God” is not a reasonable argument. Anyone that relies upon mythical beings to guide their life is missing a large part of their own reasoning. Then when their “god” specifically tells them it is wrong to kill I would have thought they would listen.
The very thing you think of others is what you really are. A spineless, cowardly, hypocrite. A typical Republican base.
It also costs a lot of money to send people to jail…
It also costs a lot of money to raise criminals from infancy…
I love how people that are pro life are pro death penalty. This is why for all of my problems with the Catholic Church, I admire their consistency on life.
In my mind it is barbaric to kill. To snuff out a life is a horrible mistake. Even the most evil person has a right to live so that they may ponder the mistakes they have made.
I do not believe that our justice system is there to exact revenge. It is there to deter people from committing crimes and to reform criminals. The death penalty does neither. It is ineffective and only makes the victims and weak minded people “feel” better. That is not the role of government. We are the only Western Civilization to still use it, and for good reason.
Chinese solved this problem long time ago:
they force families to pay for the bullet used in execution.
Raising a criminal costs the family of criminal (mostly), while keeping criminals alive costs all of us – that means ME and YOU.
Do you want to pay all your life for criminals to be kept alive like a leeches of off your taxes? If not, then you should be for death penalty. If you are against death penalty why don’t you pay for them yourself instead of asking all of us to chip-in…
Should this be about cost?
If you think it is, you’ve missed the point.
What kind of crock is this? Bring back the guillotine. And I believe in the eye for an eye when it comes to pre-meditated murder. Without a higher punishment, criminals laugh at their “punishment” Please it’s almost fashionable to go to jail nowadays. It sure help Sony and their rappers.
#32,
I don’t think doing things like the Chinese is very constructive. Or imaginative.
Didn’t your mother ever ask you:
“So if all the other kids were jumping off a bridge, you would too”?
Re: #34, “And I believe in the eye for an eye when it comes to pre-meditated murder. “
Be careful when you murder someone. You could lose an eye.
# 10 Alfred1 said, “Any other outcome for the murderer, even toil to pay financially to the family of the murdered, not fair.”
Spoken like a true thumper, Alfie, an eye for an eye and all that. Oh, wait, in Romans aren’t we told never to avenge ourselves because vengeance belongs to God? Oh, dear, oh, dear. So many contradictions in the bible. What is one to do???
#35
Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to take what is not yours?
So, its the criminals’ mothers fault they are what they are – a criminals? 🙂