Death penalty not a sound financial decision
Posted October 20, 2011 at 7:36 pm in Columns, Opinion
The prosecutors in the Scott Dekraai case announced last Friday they are seeking the death penalty as Dekraai’s punishment for killing nine people in a Seal Beach salon.
I do not look upon this tragic event simply. How could one person kill not only the mother of his eight-year-old son, but other innocent people? I’m torn between demanding an eye for an eye and demanding we value human life as something we cannot take from one another.
Rather than decide our feelings about the death on a purely emotional level, we should instead examine how much the death penalty costs. It’s clear the costs are greater than the potential benefits — which are already limited.
The death penalty costs a lot more than most realize. When we consider cases like Troy Davis’, where the line between guilty and innocent is more muddled than pronounced, it’s easy to see the death penalty is not only costly but ineffective.
Taxpayers have paid more than $250 million for California’s executions, as compared to the $47,000 cost to keep an inmate in jail for life without parole, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. This stark fiscal contrast raises a few questions, but the most important one is whether we are willing to continue spending this much to kill someone.
The death penalty is a moral issue on which many have struggled to fully come to a conclusion. But, supporting spending any money on a person rightfully guilty of murder is something the government should not support. It’s unnecessary, it’s vacuous and it’s simply wasteful spending.
Continuing to enforce the death penalty is ineffective because it doesn’t factor in the chance of wrongly accusing someone of a crime. In Dekraai’s case, this does not apply because he was seen committing the murders. But in many cases, the level of guilt upon those convicted can’t be categorized into a binary, yet it is so often done. Again, think of Troy Davis. The Innocence Project website reports 17 death row inmates have been exonerated through DNA testing.
In the grand scheme of things, 17 lives seems small compared to how many people die every day. But 17 lives that were consciously taken away seems far more grave than a life lost because of natural causes or other variables.
The death penalty is a complicated punishment. We can’t sentence people to death and merely hope it was the right thing to do.
The monumental costs of the death penalty outweigh its supposed positives. The only reward the death penalty allows is revenge, and although my heart goes out to the victims of the shooting, I can’t bring myself to partake in blind revenge.
Mellissa Linton is a sophomore majoring in English. Her counterpoint runs Fridays.
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All I got out of this article is once we decide someone is guilty of a capital crime – we need to execute the perp that same day. The capital punishment is not what is expensive – it is the circus we indulge in around the crime that is ridiculously expensive – both financially and emotionally.
Those of us who have actually lost a family member to violence should be the decision makers when it comes to whether the death penalty is a fitting punishment for the culprit. The op-ed author glibly writes “although my heart goes out to the victims of the shooting, I can’t bring myself to partake in blind revenge.” Typical, as anti-death penalty advocates are always more concerned for the perpetrators than they are for the victims. Seeing as how this op-ed writer is not experiencing the rending anguish of instantly and unexpectedly losing a family member (a parent or a sibling) to a violent rampage, it’s unsurprising that she can’t understand the bitter emotional and psychological torture of such a loss. Anyway, who said revenge is wrong? Oh, that’s right — the “compassionate” folk who are more concerned for the perps than for the victims.
When I read your figures, I was appalled enough to write my opinion here. There’s no way the financial figures that you cite are correct:
Taxpayers have paid more than $250 million for California’s executions, as compared to the $47,000 cost to keep an inmate in jail for life without parole, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
You need to breakdown the statistics correctly. I know the cost of maintaining ONE prisoner hovers from $30,000 to $50,000 a year. You multiply that out for the number of death row prisoners and the number of years they’re all stuck and you have a figure in the hundreds of millions. $250 million is probably the cost of feeding, housing, and watching over the death row prisoners for the duration of the time they live.
If you keep someone in prison for life, not only is it taxing for the victim’s loved ones — it taxes us the people as well. So if some guy goes on a killing rampage, it makes sense for taxpayers to house this man and pay for this accommodations when that money can go to better uses publicly? It does not make moral or fiscal sense to me at all.
Do you know how much tax money the State of California spends to maintain the prison system?
The California death penalty system costs taxpayers $114 million per year beyond the costs of keeping convicts locked up for life.
Taxpayers have paid more than $250 million for each of the state’s executions.
Death row inmates in the U.S. typically spend over a decade awaiting execution. Some prisoners have been on death row for well over 20 years
The length of time that U.S. inmates spend on death row has gotten increasingly longer in recent years, and raises questions about the constitutionality of this added punishment. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has not addressed this issue, it has been cited as a serious concern by death penalty experts in the U.S. and by courts outside the U.S. Shortening the time on death row would be difficult without either a significant allocation of new resources or a risky curtailment of necessary reviews.
In conclusion .. DO WE want to spend tax payers money and have this guy alive for the next 20 years?
The death penalty should not take more than 10 years from conviction to execution. All prisoners can have the governor set them free. The governor cannot bring the dead back to life.