The death penalty is a costly, outdated, and unnecessary means of punishment that must be eliminated. While capital punishment may be a longstanding consequence in many countries, modern America has no reason to continue the practice of putting criminals to death.
Morality, of course, is a major issue of the debate over capital punishment, but there are several other more objective reasons for the removal of the death penalty. While cost has been a chief argument for proponents of the death penalty, the reality is that, in many cases, the total cost for the entire process of capital punishment —from legal fees to the cost of housing death row prisoners and that of lethal injection drugs — far exceeds the cost of a life sentence in prison. A 2012 study by Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School found that, in California, the cost of keeping a prisoner on death row was about $85,000 per year, compared to the $45,000 a year it costs to keep a regular prisoner.
Even in states where death row inmates are held in general population, capital punishment expenses can cost taxpayers thousands. Death penalty cases in Kansas and Tennessee cost 70% and 48% more than the cost of non-death penalty cases, according to the Kansas Legislative Post Audit and the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury Office of Research, respectively. On top of these expenses, the value of lethal drugs has soared in recent years, as pharmaceutical companies raise prices and stop producing these injections. When one unnamed pharmacy stopped selling lethal drugs, the state of Virginia saw the price of a single injection increase by 63 times to $66,000 according to The Associated Press. The notion that it is cheaper to kill someone than to keep them imprisoned is misguided. Even when it involves the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes, the death penalty is a costly and overly simplistic solution to how we should punish our most violent criminals.
Far more important than the cost is the risk of false executions. The legal system is not perfect, and sentencing criminals to death strips away our ability to exonerate potentially innocent individuals. A 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal found that 4.1% of criminals sentenced to death are falsely convicted. Additionally, the study found that twice as many defendants have been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death than exonerated and freed. This figure sheds light on the barbaric nature of capital punishment. A life sentence can be reversed — death cannot. An advanced society should have better ways to deal with extreme criminal offenses, especially because potential exonerees have already been executed.
The sooner society realizes that the death penalty is too costly, flawed, and barbaric, the sooner the justice system can come to better punish our criminals. Until then, states will pour millions of taxpayer dollars into government mandated killings.
