www.justiceblind.com

There are logical arguments in favor of capital punishment in theory.  The simplest is that when a person commits the ultimate crime of murder, he deserves to pay the ultimate price by sacrificing his own life as payment for his crime.

However, the death penalty does not exist in theory but only as it is applied in the real world.  And this is how it must be judged.

I've just completed a study of scholarly experts on capital punishment – people who have taught and conducted research about the death penalty for their entire careers – and they overwhelmingly oppose capital punishment as it is applied, call for its abolition and unanimously favor alternatives including life imprisonment without parole.

The experts offer three main reasons for their opposition.

First, the death penalty fails to achieve its goals of retribution, deterrence and incapacitation.  Because killings so rarely lead to an execution in the United States, capital punishment does not achieve justice for society or for relatives of murder victims, does not scare would-be murderers, and does not kill enough murderers to have any impact on the murder rate.

In the United States between 1977 and 2006, there were more than 575,000 murders and non-negligent homicides.  These led to only 7,072 death sentences and 1,063 executions. Thus, only 1.2 percent of killings from 1977 to 2006 led to death sentences, and only 0.18 percent of killings have led to an execution so far.  The rarity of the death penalty is precisely why it is so ineffective.

Second, the application of the death penalty in the United States is plagued by significant biases based on race, social class and gender.  Killers of whites are far more likely to be executed than killers of blacks – regardless of the race of the killer – but especially when the killer is black and the victim is white.  In the United States since 1977, 213 blacks who killed whites have been executed, versus only 15 whites who killed blacks.

Further, virtually every person on death row is poor, consistent with the evidence that what determines who gets executed is not the heinousness of the crime but the quality of the defense.  And citizens in every state with capital punishment are remarkably squeamish about executing women.

Third, there is a serious risk that capital punishment will be used against the factually innocent.  Not only do we know that 113 people in twenty-five states have been released from death row since 1977, but there is also no doubt that states have recently executed innocent people.  Clear cases of innocence have emerged in Texas, Missouri and Florida.

On top of all this, executions generally cost at least twice as much as alternative and more effective punishments such as life imprisonment without parole.  This is an enormous waste of resources that could be invested in crime prevention strategies that would save lives.

Judged by any standard, the death penalty is a failed policy.  It fails to meet its goals, and its costs clearly outweigh the modest benefits.

Supporters may react with a call for more executions, which logically would make capital punishment more effective at achieving retribution, deterrence and incapacitation.  But the reality is that prosecutors are not willing to seek the punishment, juries are not willing to impose it, and counties and states are unwilling to pay the enormous costs to carry out the death penalty with any greater frequency.

The only right thing to do is to end executions once and for all.  Twelve states and the District of Colombia already live without the death penalty.  Additionally, even most death penalty states almost never carry out an execution (only nine states with the death penalty carried out at least one execution annually since 1977; only one of those – Texas – averaged more than four executions per year).  Finally, executions in eleven death penalty states are currently halted due to various problems with lethal injection.  These facts show that capital punishment is something we could easily live without.

The legislatures of every state should abolish capital punishment.  In the real-world, the death penalty is a criminal-justice policy that is ineffective, inefficient, plagued by serious problems, and unfixable.