An addition to an old thread.
I was chatting with Tron in another thread the other day, and the death penalty came up as a side topic. I wrote rather a long post with some interesting statistics that reminded me of this thread.-------------------------------------------------
Duplicated from the post I made the other day.
Some facts about the death penalty. (With the jokes I originally inserted, left out and some spelling mistakes rectified after re-reading it.😀)
Deterrence
It has never been shown that the death penalty deters violent crimes more effectively than other punishments.
A survey by the UN on the relation between the death penalty and homicide rates concluded, "Research has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment and such proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. The evidence as a whole still
gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis..."
Recent crime figures from countries which have abolished the death penalty do not show that abolishment had any harmful effects.
Race
83% of capital cases involve white victims, even though only 50% of murder victims are white.
It is much more likely for someone to receive the death penalty when the victim is white, than when the person is not.
Innocence
Since 1973, over 80 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence.
Researchers Radelet & Bedau found 23 cases since 1900 where innocent people were executed.
Retiring Florida Supreme Court Justice Gerald Kogan said he had "grave doubts" about the guilt of some of the people executed in Florida: "There are several cases where I had grave doubts as to the guilt of a particular person." . Kogan was a former homicide detective and prosecutor before eventually rising to Chief Justice.
The number of innocent defendants released from death row has been steadily increasing over recent years. Between 1973 and October, 1993, there was an average of 2.5 innocent defendants released. Since then, the average has increased to 4.6 released per year.
According to a 1987 study, three hundred and fifty people convicted of capital crimes in the United States between 1900 and 1985 were innocent of the crimes charged. Some prisoners escaped execution by minutes, but 23 were actually executed.
Costs
One of the most comprehensive studies on the death penalty in the country found the death penalty to cost North Carolina $2.16 million per execution over the costs of a non-death penalty murder case with a sentence of imprisonment for life.
On a national basis, this translates to an extra cost of over $1 billion dollars since 1976.
In Texas, a death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million, which is about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell with the highest level of security for forty years.
A 1998 report from the Nebraska Judiciary Committee states that any savings from executing an inmate are outweighed by the financial legal costs. The report concluded that the current death penalty law does not serve the best interest of Nebraskans.
The Judicial Conference of the United States reported that the defense costs in cases where death was sought were about four times higher than in comparable cases where death was not sought. It was also found that the prosecution costs in death cases were 67% higher than the defense costs, without even including the investigative costs provided by law enforcement agencies.
I think that covers just about every argument for the death penalty, bar one. That argument is the "it'll make me feel better if we're able to kill some of our prisoners, because I'm full of hatred and vengeful feelings" argument. I can't really comment on that one, because I've not been personally touched by a case where the death penalty might have been a remedy. I don't think such feelings should effect a country's laws though. People who've lost loved ones to murderers are certainly entitled to feel them, but you can't run a country or a judiciary on sentiment. My profound sympathies are with anyone who's been in that position though. I've seen people in my job who have, so I do know what it feels like.
