The United States should have a death penalty.

1. The death penalty is just If even a small number of crimes are so horrendous as to justify the death penalty, then we can move to the question of what it is worth to have justice.The death penalty should be reserved for the most heinous of crimes of capital murder. Two examples are multiple or mass murder, or killing a child by torture. Prosecutors will seek the death penalty against four of seven suspects facing murder charges in the July death of a Florida couple known for adopting special-needs children, authorities said Monday. ... prosecutors believe there were dual motives in the killings -- robbery and a contracted hit. ... one of the children, a boy who has autism and speech issues, was in his parents' room at the time they were killed there. ... The boy, ... in an interview with a nurse ... told her that "two bad men" wearing black masks awakened Byrd Billings and told him: "You're going to die."[4. http://tinyurl.com...] Family Says Horn Lake Boy Was 'Tortured To Death': Assistant District Attorney Steven Jubera and police detective Scott Evans saw the boy’s body the day he was found in the bathroom of the Horn Lake home. … “I can speak personally. Shock, horror,” said Jubera. “I don’t think anybody who saw the child will ever be left unaffected. ...Family members who saw the boy in the funeral home say he had bruises all over, what appeared to be cigarette burns on his face, and ligature marks on his arms and legs, which means he likely had been tied up. … Jubera says the 11-year-old only weighed 56 pounds.” [5. http://tinyurl.com...] We have innumerable examples of horrendous crimes, but it only takes one case to justify the death penalty. If there were only one, the law could be constrained to that type of special circumstances. Undeniably, the purpose of a system of justice is to provide justice. Whenever justice is not met, society loses confidence in the system and criminals get the impression that society does not care about crime. Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, said Brutal facts have immense power.... Those who commit such atrocities, I concluded, forfeit their own right to live. We tarnish the memory of the dead and heap needless misery on their surviving families by letting the perpetrators live. [6. in Bedau, et al, Debating the Death Penalty. Kindle loc. 143 Oxford University Press.] 2. Death penalty costs are balanced by plea bargaining savings Opponents of the death penalty argue that carrying out a sentence of life without parole costs less. They overlook the counter-balancing savings of having the death penalty as a bargaining chip by which a guilt plea is obtained in return for taking the death penalty off the table. If the defendant pleads guilty, the cost of a trial and expensive appeals are avoided. Moreover, a serial killer may disclose his other victims in return for life-without-parole. Prosecutors will only accept claims verified by the locations of the bodies. Closing those cases reduces the cost of investigation and provides closure to the families of the victims. Without the death penalty, the only bargaining is reducing life-without-parole to a sentence that allows the possibility of release. In the case of the Green River Killer, the killer pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated murder and agreed provided information to help locate remains, closing the cases and providing closure to the families. [7. http://tinyurl.com...] One study found, “Defense attorneys are likely to initiate pleas in death-eligible cases and to do so at the earliest stages of the case. Their clients accepted pleas to sentences that would, in noncapital cases, not be considered; the perceived severity of life without parole changes when that sanction is compared with the alternative of death.” [8. http://tinyurl.com...] A 2009 study showed that plea bargains for capital crimes in districts having the death penalty are far more common that in districts without the death penalty. For the costs to balance, a death penalty case would have to cost 2.4 times as much as a non-death-penalty case. In Kansas and Tennessee, the costs were only 1.6 and 1.5 times as much. [9. http://tinyurl.com...] If that is typical, plea-bargaining using the death penalty saves more than prosecuting death penalty cases. The study was limited to a sample of about 200 cases, so the data is not conclusive. The study authors point out that major studies of the cost of administering the death penalty omit the offsetting saving from enhanced plea bargaining. 3. Costs of administering the death penalty could be significantly lower. The main reason that it costs so much to prosecute death penalty cases is that judges opposed to the death penalty allow trivial or even ridiculous legal arguments to be used as an excuse to delay carrying out the sentence. Some judges go so far as to violate the law in supporting appeals. Judge Kozinski explains, … the Supreme Court has constructed a highly complex—and mutually contradictory—series of conditions that must be satisfied before a death sentence may be carried out. On the one hand, there must be individual justice: there can be no mandatory death sentence, no matter how heinous the crime. On the other hand, there must be consistent justice: discretion to impose the death penalty must be tightly circumscribed. But individual justice is inherently inconsistent—different juries reach different results in similar cases. [6. op cit loc 304] Death cases—particularly as the execution draws near—distort the deliberative process and turn judges into advocates. There are those of my colleagues who have never voted to uphold a death sentence and doubtless never will. The view that judges are morally justified in undermining the death penalty, even though it has been approved by the Supreme Court, was legitimatized by the former Supreme Court Justices William J. Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall, who voted to vacate as cruel and unusual every single death sentence that came before the Court. [6. op cit loc 242] A remedy is to tighten the judicial oath and to provide an independent panel to censure judges who pursue politics on the bench. The ultimate remedy is impeachment by the legislature to restore legislative power to the proper branch of government. Some lengthy appeals are generated when the initial counsel did not provide an adequate defense. This happens when a rural locality cannot afford expensive outside counsel to defend the accused. State governments should bear the costs; those costs will be saved later by a shortened appeals process. Finally, all appeals based upon legal process should be required to be filed within two years of the initial conviction. That would prevent judges from granting delays based upon appeals filed in sequence. 4. Wrongful convictions are rare and offset by lives saved There have been over 14,000 executions in the U.S. Since 1992, The Innocence Project has reversed 18 death row convictions based upon DNA evidence. [10. http://tinyurl.com...] Whether anyone has been falsely executed in recent years is arguable, but I'll grant the possibility. Now that forensic evidence is so well known, prosecutors are less likely to file false charges, and juries are extremely unlikely to convict without solid forensics. Murders in prison by inmates serving life without parole (LWOP) are also quite rare. There are about 50,000 such prisoners [11. http://tinyurl.com...] and the murder rate for those is no worse than the general prison population, about 4.7 per 100,000 population. [12. https://death.rdsecure.org...] That means that there are likely to be 2 or 3 prison murders per year commited those serving LWOP. If one takes the stand that all that counts are the number of wrongful deaths, the number prevented by execution is probably greater than those saved. The death penalty is just and should be kept in the United States.