Lawmakers Must Heed Death Penalty Ruling

Today, California voter support for the death penalty is at its lowest point in more than four decades, according to the L.A. Times. Since the beginning of this year, three of the country’s ten executions have been botched.

In January, Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire suffered a 25-minute suffocation. In April, Oklahoma inmate Clayton died after 43 minutes due to a heart attack from an untested drug mixture. And just last month in Arizona, Joseph Rudolph Wood gasped and snorted for almost 2 hours before finally taking his last breath.

These events, coupled with Judge Cormac Carney’s ruling that the penalty is unconstitutional in California, have rightfully put the death penalty by lethal injection under glaring scrutiny. Lawmakers must listen to voters and take the California ruling of the death penalty seriously in order to mend the system.

As with advancements in every field, practices that have been in existence for a long time should be checked. At first glance, the California ruling is astonishing considering that the U.S. Supreme Court has, in the past, upheld death by firing squad, hanging, lethal gas, electrocution and lethal injection. None of these methods of inflicting death violate the Eight Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, according to the high court. However, we can’t redefine ourselves without redefining the laws that govern us. Justice must certainly be served to every victim but the means of justice shouldn’t mean more inhumane bloodshed, as was in the case of Joseph Wood and others.

Not only is capital punishment unconstitutional in that it is cruel and unusual, but there are also multiple areas that need work.

The price tag of these executions is one such area.According to assessments by Judge Arthur Alarcon and Prof. Paula Mitchell in 2011, the cost of the death penalty in California comes up to over $4 billion since 1978. If the Governor commuted the sentences of those remaining on death row to life without parole, it would help save $170 million per year. Over the next twenty years, those savings accumulate to $5 billion.

The effectiveness of not only the execution method itself, but also the entire system, is another area that belies need for repair. Unfortunately, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, compared to states that do administer the death penalty, states that do not follow it have consistently lower rates of homicide. The gap has grown since 1990. According to these statistics, though the ultimate aim of condemning heinous prisoners with death penalty is to decrease the rate of murder in the society, the efficacy seems to be amiss.

As stated in The Economist, the average prisoner who is executed in California has spent 25 years on death row—much longer than the national average of nearly 16 years. The root of the efficacy issue seems to be that the long delays in executions fail to deter potential murderers out there. If death penalty is playing no role in influencing the minds of the criminals before they commit the crime, it doesn’t serve a point.

Yet, the victim’s family and friends should not be left out either. Most certainly, they will deserve a peace of mind after all they’ve been through. But people must understand that an eye for an eye only makes the world blind. The death penalty, in a sense, is simply based on revenge, a get-even measure that destroys people that have destroyed others. In the process, nothing is gained.

Rather than maximizing the punishment, lawmakers need to focus all efforts on minimizing the crime rate, the root of the issue. Education might be one key factor in tackling homicide. According to The Mercury, 70 percent of this nation’s prison population has failed to receive high school diplomas. Long-term research has shown that if more is invested into pre-K education, graduation rates can be boosted by as much as 44 percent and keep young adults on the right side of the law. According to a 2013 RAND (Research ANd Development) report, correctional education programs for inmates are also effective—those who participated were 43 percent less likely to become repeat offenders.

That being said, instead of investing so much into a penalty that is unconstitutional, inhumane, costly and ineffective all in one, preventive measures rather than consequential measures should pull more weight. The death penalty is a moral and financial disaster that needs to meet its own end.