The Death Penalty Should be Abolished in the USA

Thanks, treeless, for accepting. I will now present my arguments. 1. Death sentences are not handed down consistently. In 31 states, death is a possible punishment. In 19, it is not. In Oklahoma, 6 percent of murderers get death. In Texas, 2 percent of them do. (As of 2004)(1)There's a lot of inconsistency between the states, but there can also be inconsistency due to other factors. For example, the jury,must decide whether the defendant should die or not. The jury can easily decide different things in different cases depending on the people on the jury. Of course, this is true with guilty/not guilty verdicts, but when people die due to the composition of a jury, there is something wrong. Another inconsistency is the prosecution of more people for the death penalty when a white person is murdered. Again as of 2004, black people who murder white peoples get the most death prosecutions, then white people who murder white people, then white people who murder black people and finally black people who murder black people. This valuing of some life over other life is clearly absurd and results in people getting killed for offences that they wouldn't die for if they only murdered someone else. This inconsistency is a strong reason for abolishing the death penalty, because it is being applied unjustly. 2. Innocent deaths. Since 1973, 130 people have been released from death row after they were found innocent (2). 130! That means that almost certainly, out of the 1416 that have been executed since 1976 (3) at least one innocent life was ended. If the death penalty was not in existence, that person (or those people) would have spent a long time in jail, sure. However, there is a likelihood that new evidence would have come out to free those people if they were not executed. Also, the act of killing innocent people is a terrible one morally. If the state does do it (it probably does) how is it any better than the murderers it is targeting? 3. The death penalty is supposed to be a retributive measure. If you murder, you are supposed to get murdered. However, only 2.5% of murderers get death sentences(1). That means that the death penalty is not about retribution. It is about chance. The jury can decide on subjective things such as the character of the defendant or the defendant's remorse. Therefore, the death penalty can be retribution for the jury not you enough, or you not crying as hard as they would like. The death penalty must be applied to all murderers, or all of one type of murderer to even begin to be fair. The Supreme Court ruled such a system unconstitutional in Gregg v. Georgia (4). Therefore, the death penalty cannot legally be applied in a fair manner and should be abolished. 4. The death penalty leads to murders. In 2013, the murder rate in death penalty states was 4.72 per 100,000 people. In non-death penalty states, it was 3.88 per 100,000 (5). It is true, correlation does not equal causation. But at the very least, the death penalty is not a better deterrent than life imprisonment. At worst, the death penalty could be leading to more murders by angering individuals. A system which is not working should go. The death penalty is clearly not working as a deterrent. 5. The death penalty costs more than life imprisonment. It is a common misconception that the death penalty is cheaper. It really is not, and will never be. Due to the large amount of appeals and oversight, it cost $90,000 per year per inmate to hold someone on death row in California in 2008 (6). The average wait on death row for Americans is 10 years(2). That adds up to a lot of wasted money. In fact, California could save over 120 million dollars a year by abolishing the death penalty (6). That's right. By abolishing an inefficient an unfair system, California would save money. Imagine what could be done with 120 million dollars! It could be spent on health, education, parks, even crime prevention. Surely this helps society more than killing people. 6. International consensus. In the UN in 2014, 117 countries voted to abolish the death penalty worldwide. 38 voted to keep it.(7)The death penalty is on the way out in the rest of the world. Clearly, most countries have realised that the death penalty is expensive, unfair and kills innocents. Hopefully, the USA does at some point as well. Sources 1. http://www.news.cornell.edu... 2.http://www.bbc.co.uk... 3.http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... 4.https://supreme.justia.com... 5.http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... 6.http://deathpenalty.org... 7. http://america.aljazeera.com...