THIS IS STRAIGHT FROM WIKIPEDIA, NOT MY WORDS, NOT TO BE TAKEN AS FACTS, PLEASE READ CAREFULLY.
Economic arguments
Economic arguments are usually not the central issues in death penalty debates, but there is an economic side of almost any issue, and the death penalty is no exception. The issue was initially raised by the opponents who proposed an anecdotal argument that the death penalty is more expensive and time consuming than life imprisonment. The proponents countered that the death penalty actually has more economic benefit. However, they did not argue that the death penalty should be retained for this reason. Arguments have been produced from both opponents and supporters of the death penalty based on economics.[11] The term "economic" in the context of the death penalty is sometimes used in the wider sense of any utilitarian argument, not merely financial arguments.
Opponents of the death penalty point out that capital cases usually cost more than life imprisonment due to the extra court costs, such as appeals and extra supervisions. Proponents counter this argument by stating that the severity and finality of death as punishment demands that the extra resources be expended. In the US in particular, the accused is allowed to plead guilty so as to avoid the death penalty. This plea requires the accused to forfeit any appeal arguing innocence on material or procedural grounds. Furthermore, by waiving the threat of the death penalty, individuals can be encouraged to plead guilty, accomplices can be encouraged to testify against other defendants, and criminals can be encouraged to lead investigators to the bodies of victims. Proponents of the death penalty, therefore, argue that the death penalty significantly reduces the cost of the judicial process and criminal investigation. Quite a few opponents of the death penalty concede that the economic argument may be in favor of the death penalty, especially in terms of plea bargaining. However, they point out that plea bargaining increases the likelihood of a miscarriage of justice which should be counted as a cost. Moreover, had plea bargaining been abolished, the economic link between the death penalty and life imprisonment would have disappeared. The proponents point out that in such a case, those sentenced to life imprisonment would appeal indefinitely, making the cost comparison irrelevant.
.In case it matters , I am FOR the death penalty, even if it's more expensive.
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I think the power of the state should stop short of the death penalty. The state should have the power to incarcerate criminals, but an assault of this kind on the body crosses a major line, in my opinion. I think there need to be some things that we are all clear that the state is NOT allowed to do, and killing prisoners should be one of those things. I like the idea of there being this definite limit on the state's power, for symbolic reasons if nothing else. Same goes for torture.
I suppose it not surprising that I (a criminal attorney) am opposed to the death penalty. I don't consider the economic aspect of it because to me its a moral issue and a power of the State issue like you note. If it were a million or billion times cheaper to just execute people - this doesn't make any more justifiable to me.
The innocence project - started at Northwestern Univ near Chicago - has now accounted for many many exonerations from death row due to DNA mismatches. In other words, people were slated to die at the hands of the State and were innocent of the crime to be punished. The State executing ONE innocent person is one too many and is reason enough for me to consider the death penalty a barbaric practice left over from more primitive times.
Criminal prosecutions are infused with human activity from start to finish - and humans are prone to mistakes. Juries get misled - criminals confess to crimes they did not commit - witnesses for the State can be biased, ill informed, etc... The chances of killing an innocent person is simply too great - no matter the leaps and bounds of technology at the State's disposal.
And that brings up another common fallacy people have about the criminal justice system. People just assume that the rich get off because they have money. Wrong. No criminal ever has more resources at their disposal than the State can bring to bear against him. All the rich can hope to buy is parity and thats only if they are super rich. Think of the budgets of your State's police departments, forensic scientists, medical examiners, etc...etc... tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year is spent on these things. When is that last time you heard of a criminal defendant spending 65 million on a defense? The deck is always stacked against the defendant.
With 2.5 million Americans, or 1 in every 99 in jail, I can't see how you can justify a death penalty. You have to assume there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent people in jail when you have this many incarcerated. With our current culture of vengeance and envy against the accused, I think we put innocent people away every day. I would probably be against the death penalty anyway, but until we get our system under control I think it's flat off the table.
I know I'm probably in the minority.
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson
Why does a good amount of people in jail (prison actually) mean there's a lot wrongly accused? Why can't it just be we have too many stupid laws that make it too easy to incarcerate people?
But taking that at face value, what does the fact we have many innocents in prison say about the fact we have many guilty freely roaming? SO WHAT?
You're right though, so what if we can prove beyond a shadow of doubt, with the person's admission, all the physical evidence ever that a person killed 50 innocent people, you still can't justify death penalty, right? This kind of cultish principle belief is no different than those who unconditionally argue for life (or for choice).
"The government should be afraid of its people, not the other way around".
Just curious, what gives an individual the right to live, or what does one need to possess in order to be judged as deserving to live?
I often wonder what kind of person would take the job of executioner and if they sleep cozylike.
in Norway they have a completely different structure of imprisonment and its much more gentile yet they have one of the lowest crime rates in the world. The highest sentence is 21 yrs too. I am sure there is a vast difference of our societies too, but it makes me wonder if we could ever have the same effect.
hmmmm...
"free thinkers are dangerous, and beautiful"
you can get more correlation between the number of murders with the price of gas than you can between the number of murders that were prevented by the existence of the death penalty.
Many murders are highly personal in nature and a response to events - - such as a divorce, drug addict runs out of money, a rival gang moves into another gang's territory, etc... The penalty is often not even considered.
You think most murderers contemplate seriously getting caught and change their behavior accordingly?
That people who commit crimes are not the ones who think about punishment, which is MORE reason to punish them, not less. People who are stupid enough to want the punishment deserve it anyway.
"The government should be afraid of its people, not the other way around".
There's also the matter of whether or not the death penalty is a disincentive to violent crime. The majority of the economic research I've seen indicates that it does deter criminals, though it is certainly impossible to know how much. There was a very good summary of the data in the book Freedomnomics for anyone who is interested. (The book has a definite conservative bias in parts.)
I'm personally conflicted on whether or not the death penalty is morally correct. My own view is that, rather than kill a convict, throw them into the worst prison environment imaginable. The US has relative resorts for prisons when compared to some countries, even in Europe. If you want to deter the same amount of crime without actually taking the chance of killing an innocent man, then start building some dark, cold and thoroughly unpleasant dungeons for violent criminals. No more yard hours or TV time in the library--just an unventilated hole in the ground without plumbing or a bed. I have a feeling that if you make the dungeons unpleasant enough, it will be as effective (or more) than the death penalty in terms of deterence. It's cruel, but perhaps no crueler than killing another human being.
I am not a psychologist nor do I speak for everybody.
But lack of deterrence for crime should be MORE, not LESS reason to punish. If it doesn't deter crime, you might need to try something stronger. But arguing lack of deterrence makes it somehow wrong or wasteful would lead to arguing that punishment can be inherently useless in deterrence therefore punishment can always be dismissed. What a person has already done has nothing to do with what he was thinking about the punishment at the time he committed the crime.
There are many reasons death penalty is right, first of all, a dead person is a person we forget about. Secondly, we are taking a person's life he/she doesn't deserve. These two alone are good reasons to reward a person for what he did. Deterrence of future crimes is not a concern to me at all, because what a person did, needs to be address, what other people do for whatever motives should not affect what you do today. If people commit crimes that warrant death penalty and they are not deterred, should you feel MORE OK to execute them rather than LESS?
"worst prison environment imaginable." (How about starving them to death?)
"The government should be afraid of its people, not the other way around".
"Deterrence of future crimes is not a concern to me at all..."
If we're going to look at this from an economic viewpoint, then we have to consider the unseen as much as the seen. (Consider Bastiat's broken window example.) If we catch a murderer and kill him, that is what is seen. What is unseen are the dozen or more other people who contemplated killing someone, but decided that the price was too high and didn't. We'll never know who these people are or that they've judged murder too pricey a commodity, but we can know that they exist.
Punitive measures purely for the sake of getting even are worthless, because the crime has been committed and cannot be undone. Punishments are designed exactly to deter future criminals from choosing to commit crimes. If you consider murder to be a commodity to purchase, the death penalty or a dungeon would add to the price of such a commodity. Similarly, concealed carry of firearms adds to the price of theft, as a mugger must choose whether his life is worth the contents of someone's wallet. Criminals should be punished for their crimes without question; but the reason we non-criminals should want them punished most isn't revenge, but deterrence. If a man girls a little girl in the town over, I may not bear the burden of his act myself, but I don't want anyone killing MY little girl and thus want to send a message to all would-be murderers through his punishment.
So are you suggesting there's something more to the effect of
"decided that the price was too high and didn't"? If death penalty can't deter, wouldn't you be concerned that you're not doing enough?
"because the crime has been committed and cannot be undone"
Nobody said it can be undone, but that's no excuse to forgive the criminal just because you can't get even.
I completely disagree with you that non-criminals punish for deterrence. I sincerely believe it is for punishment sake, or revenge. A person has to pay for what he did, it has nothing to do with whether people in the future learn from it.
Deterrence however, is certainly a plus, lack of it should not be a minus.
"The government should be afraid of its people, not the other way around".
Revenge is still just deterence. The intended effect is to show the person who wronged you and the community at large that you are not to be triffled with. It's a display intended to show how high the costs of crimes committed again you are. The fact that revenge can feel good or satisfying could be the result of an evolutionary process, where those who enjoyed getting even survived and reproduced more than those who didn't because enemies were less willing to wrong them.
I maintain that the main incentive for a disinterested party to support the punishment of crimes against others is to deter future crimes against himself. Individual revenge deters acts against the one, but communal revenge deters criminal acts against any member of the community.
There is a balance to strike between the interests of society to deter future crime and to maintain liberty. Our own justice system attempts to be reasonable in the magnitude of punishments it gives. The result is that some crimes continue to be committed, sometimes in high numbers. While increasing the magnitude of punishment would increase deterence and lower crime, it's important to understand the costs. Vlad Dracula effectively ended crime in Wallachia during his rule, but he did so by impaling anyone who so much as took a load of bread. It's important to decide where to draw the line--what level of crime is acceptable and what level of punishment is condonable. Everything has a price.
Good to know. I don't see revenge as deterrence, but that's not worth arguing.
"The government should be afraid of its people, not the other way around".