Death Penalty

I feel that the death penalty in the United States should be abolished. My reason for supporting this position is the fact that sometimes the legal system does convict the wrong person. The legal system is not perfect and it has flaws. A very compelling example is over one hundred people, in the past thirty years, have been released from death row and prison for DNA evidence that exonerated them. That is too many innocent people that would have been executed for something that they did not do. How many people that were executed were innocent? For the most part, DNA evidence is not available in most cases. It is only available in about ten percent of cases. I feel that one innocent person being executed is reason enough to stop capital punishment. Some more reasons that I feel this way is it costs tax payers more money to try a capital punishment case because of the appeals process. The appeals process in a death penalty case is very involved and takes many years to complete. That is why a person sits on death row for years. It is cheaper to imprison someone for life than to have a death penalty case. Average cost for an inmate on death row is 2.5 to 5 million dollars. The average cost to imprison someone to life without parole is one million dollars. Another thing that was mentioned in the podcast was the deterrent factor of the death penalty. The problem with this is violent crime rate is higher in states that have the death penalty. The deterrent just does not seem to be there. In order to be a deterrent it must be sure and swift. I feel it also sends the wrong message out. It was not okay for you to kill someone, but it is okay that we kill you. It is not right to take a human life just because that person did it first.

I work in a state prison in Maryland. It is a medium and maximum security prison. The reason I mentioned that is because most of the inmates that are serving life would rather have the death penalty. I feel that life in prison, without the...