Abolishing the Death Penalty in the Era of Hope
The outcome of the election for President, and for state and local legislators, not only demonstrates how much Americans want change. It confirms Americans' commitment to our fundamental values of equality and fairness. It gives me reason to hope that we will soon see the end of the death penalty.
The American public simply cannot maintain the death penalty and be true to these deeply held values. There are too many instances of innocent men and women being sentenced to death, of people of color, both defendants and victims, being treated more harshly, and dealt with as if they were expendable.
This is why New Jersey abolished the death penalty in 2007, and why we fully expect other states will follow.
Americans can't square our values of what is right and lawful with the operation of the death penalty in practice. As we learn more about it, support for the death penalty has dropped over the years, to 63%. Support declines even further when we learn about alternatives to the death penalty, and are given the opportunity to choose life rather than death.
With the current economic downturn, all government programs -- including the death penalty -- should and will be evaluated on whether they deliver on their promises and whether the "benefits" they confer are worth the cost. Measured against this stricter standard, the death penalty comes up short. Having failed to deliver on the promise of accurately selecting only the guilty to receive the punishment, it also fails miserably at being cost efficient, and worse, it siphons precious resources from helping crime victims heal and move on with their lives, or preventing the tragedy of murder from occurring in the first place.
Americans would be appalled to discover how much of their tax dollars support the flawed, ineffective death penalty system. For example, it costs Florida $51 million a year to enforce the death penalty above what it would cost to sentence first degree murderers to life in prison without parole. Imagine how that money could be spent on better ways to ensure public safety, such as hiring and training more police to protect our neighborhoods, and enabling them to purchase the equipment they need to do so, such as updated patrol cars, and more efficient information technology systems,
As newly elected and incumbent state legislators take their seats in statehouses next year, they should remember that constituents expect them to provide leadership and creative thinking on a range of social problems, including criminal justice reform and the death penalty. To paraphrase one commentator's post-election analysis, Americans want a more pragmatic and concrete approach to our nation's problems, not rhetoric and symbolic nods in that direction.
An honest assessment of the problems associated with the death penalty is long overdue. The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and its more than 100 affiliates looks forward to engaging state legislators in a reasoned, thoughtful discussion about capital punishment and its alternatives.
Diann Rust-Tierney is the Executive Director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
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Thank you for your statements in support of abolishing the death penalty. I fully agree. I know of lifers who have made a 180' turn and done good for others from within the prison system.
I am sorry to read that Ms. Rust-Tierney does not first address the moral inconsistency inherent in a system that outlaws murder and legalizes capital punishment before she mentions innocents being executed, racial discrimination and the expense involved. Avoiding those situations would be a side benefit of abolition. The true advantage would be in first adhering to the ethical imperative which prohibits murder.
I'm totally against the death sentence. For a terrible enough crime, the sentence should be Life Without Chance of Parole (LWOP).
Send the worst ones off so Supermax in Colorado if need be. 23/7 in their cage/cell.
I belong to the National Coalition to Abolish The Death Penalty and I'm pro-life for in-utero babies, as well.
No Hypocrite here.
Jesus teaches forgiveness. He also warns that those who cannot forgive, and are without mercy, will be the ones who are not forgiven and will not be shown mercy.
One of my favorite quotes is from 1940's abolitionists who said: "If Moses is our lawgiver [Old Testament prophet given laws by God] at this time let us obey him, not in part only, but wholly, and put every Sabbath breaker, blasphemer, and adulterer to death." We’d all be out of luck huh…if these 10 commandments were still the laws we had to follow! Aren’t you glad Jesus came along?
I know I have written what seems to be a book here, but I’d like to address one more thing: money. Most people are IGNORANT to the fact that housing an inmate for LIFE costs LESS than execution; in fact it costs 4 times less!!! The average death penalty case per offender is $1 - $3 MILLION dollars (with some cases going as high as $7 million) while housing an inmate for life costs a fraction over $500,000. You do the math, and if you don’t believe these facts look them up!
Overcrowded prisons are NOT the common problem you are led to believe they are. You hear about those “problems” because groups that run private prisons make BILLIONS off of their free slaves…oops did I say that? I meant inmates. Prisons are A BIG money making powerhouse, who are even traded on the stock market! Do the research!!!!
It breaks my heart to see so much hatred in the world today. Violence should NEVER be repaid with violence. It sickens me to see all of the hypocrites of the world teaching their children that "two wrongs don't make a right", but in the same breath teach their children that it is okay to kill if somebody they have done something bad. There are plenty of guilty people in the world, but to pay for a crime with your life is INSANE.
Executions are revenge, pure and simple. Nothing good comes from an execution; inmates don't learn from their mistakes, and it only creates more victims. We pride ourselves on being a civilized society, but a society that allows for the murder of its citizens is FAR FROM civilized. Do you rape somebody who rapes? Do you steal from a thief? Do you assault an assaulter? Of course you don't, so why would you kill a killer? We should try and refrain from responding in this "brutal" way because the punishment is not only degrading to those on whom it is imposed, but it is also degrading to the society that engages in the same behavior as the criminals.
I am sure that many of you have heard pro-death penalty people say an "eye for an eye", while preaching the old testament ways (when the death penalty was common practice), but...along came Jesus, and the rules changed a little bit!
It's interesting how many more responses that are pro capital punishment this article generated. The death penalty has never been proved to be a deterrent to murder, it doesn't save money, and it can't be administered fairly or precisely. It is not about justice, it is about vengeance for a small number of people (victim's families), but in larger measure it is about power. Political power and catering to the baser instincts of mankind. It is also about money, the lack of which is the most likely cause of the perceived racial bias, but then political power and money go hand in glove (or pocket as the case may be). The gross generalizations and characterizations of criminals in most of the responses diminish their effectiveness as they betray a woeful lack of first hand knowledge of the penal system and/or the administration of the death penalty. Having met and talked to several very decent people who were unjustly arrested and convicted including one who spent 7 years on death row has certainly opened my eyes to the potential for horrible mistakes.
I also have strenuous objections to life without parole.
Just as the pro-death folks sound bloodthirsty in their cries for vengeance -- Kill them ALL, life without parole denies the redemptive capacity in nearly all human beings.
There is a path to the heinous crime.
That path nearly ALWAYS goes through the USAmerican criminal-injustice system. Being retributive and violent, the entire system from bottom to top, from Juvenile halls to the "Supermax", are primarily torture centers where (poor) folks awaiting trial or folks convicted of crimes are crammed together in environments where the most predatory and vicious among them are in charge and are free to impart their criminal knowledge and attitudes to the weaker inmates.
As long as the ignorant among us cry out for vengeance the "crime problem" will NOT be solved. The death penalty is just the most obvious crime against those who transgress (at least the poorest, darkest skinned and unluckiest of them) but the whole system is a crime against society.
The death penalty shouldn't be removed - it should be expanded.
Anyone given a 'life sentence without the possibility of parole' should be given the death penalty - why should we pay to keep them for 20...30....50... or more years if we deem them unfit to reenter society EVER. This would also help reduce prison overcrowding and mean there would be more funds available to spend on the rehabilitation of other criminals.
Prisons are already badly overcrowded and, even in prisons, life expectancy is rising. Every year the percentage of the prison population that is 'ineligible for parole EVER' keeps rising so the costs to taxpayers will keep rising. Add to this the incalculable costs of injuries and deaths of the prison staff who are assaulted while overseeing them (which happens a lot as the prisons have NOTHING to lose). Personally I see very little benefit from not expanding the death penalty and lots of benefit for expanding it.
or we could make prison a civilized place to exist and not diminish ourselves by torturing and murdering people.
I'd like to know how you can make prison a 'civilised place' when the vast majority of inmates aren't civilised - that's precisely the reason that they are in prison - if they were civilised they wouldn't be in there. And, even if you could make it a civilised place, I still don't see this as a reason to remove or restrict the death penalty.
I didn't say anything about torture and, as far as I know, it isn't widely practiced in american prisons on american prisoners. That's not to say it doesn't happen or to comment on what happens at Gitmo. Unless by 'torture' you mean the act of imprisonment itself and you would prefer them all released?
As for classing the death penalty as 'murder' that is down to individual perspective. I don't argue that it could be classed as legalised murder but I still prefer it than indefinate sentences, mainly for the reasons I listed in my original post... it's a damn site cheaper and it's safer for other prisoners and prison staff.
Why is it that those who are most pro-life are also most pro-death penalty?
I am pro-choice, but I am not pro-abortion, and I don't believe that ANYONE has the right to take a human life, except for self preservation. Many years ago, I was watching on the news an interview with a jury that had just condemned a man to death. When asked why they reached that decision, one of the jurors said, "We did it as our duty in God's name." How do you take a life in God's name? And how many innocent people have been put to death ... in God's name?
As Desmond Tutu once said, if we all follow the logic of an eye for an eye, then we'll all end up blind! I think we've become a society blinded to the meaning of justice and thereby we blindly assume that we have the wisdom to determine who lives and who dies.
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It is a good thing that this country has people like Diann Rust Tierney..
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Hopefully, this country will also realize that allowing gang stalkers to poison and irradiate people is also a violation of deeply held values:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22gang%20stalking%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
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If you abolish criminal acts first, then I will support abolishment of the death penalty.
I'd love to see your plan for abolishing criminal acts! Let's just excommunicate criminal acts to an island out in the Pacific where we won't have to worry about them again! Let's shun criminal acts society-wide so that they feel ashamed of themselves and start walking with their heads hung low, sad to have been born criminal acts. No, better yet, let's put criminal acts on a rocket and send them up into outer space and have it fly directly into the sun!
I'm torn about the death penalty. On one hand, it may be a deterrent. Then, on MSNBC's "Raw" where they interview dangerous incarcerated criminals, I saw a young man who purposely killed his mom so that he would be put to death because that was his wish--to die. He believed that if he committed suicide, he would not go to heaven. He claims he manipulated the system and got what he wanted.
Most of these people had the same story. Same background. Turbulent childhoods full of sexual and physical abuse, mental health problems such as depression, substance abuse (inherited from addicted parents), PSTD and schizophrenia. If someone had cared about them as children, their outcomes would be drastically different. Perhaps the people they murdered would still be alive.
Here's the basic premise: You take a life, you lose your life.
Capital punishment, if administered fairly, surely, and swiftly, can be a powerful deterrent to homicide. But the argument is overly complicated, with opponents indulging in sophistic moralizing and self-righteous emotionalism. Still-- the truth never suffers from honest examination.
Love and forgiveness are fine values, but so is JUSTICE.
Governments are not perfect; make every effort to insure a fair and just verdict of guilt or innocence; but finally, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.
We can all willingly give up society's right to capital punishment as soon as all the murderers among us do.
"... if administered fairly ..."
We are fallible human beings. We make mistakes. And we've killed a lot of innocent people. I know you will counter this with, "So have the murderers." But I would hate to think of our justice system as murderers too!
"We can all willingly give up society's right to capital punishment as soon as all the murderers among us do."
...Then there will always be murderers among us, because it makes us all murderers.
Taking a life is taking a life, no matter how just you think it is.
There is a very important aspect with death penalty that very few people mentions: if there is a death penalty, somebody actually has to kill a person. What does it do to a person, a judge or the people who excecute to do this, how does it affect them in their daily lives, their dreams and in their life with their closest family and friends. The treatment of PTSD after wars, shows that the most harmful, the experiences that makes the most difficult PTSD is actually to have killed someone. I think that death-penalty makes the whole society suffer of this. The question is not if the rapist and murder should be allowed to live, it is if every person should be allowed not to take life.
It's true there a lot of people that scare the heck out of me with the depraved things that they do. If I could only be assured that each and every person convicted of a heinous, capital offense were truly guilty of the crime then I would support a sentence of death. I cannot fathom that there are people willing to send an innocent person to death so that the guilty may continue to be punished. All other reasoning, i.e., cost, race or utility pales when one finds that a person's life was taken mistakenly.
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