Should the Death Penalty be Abolished?
Could you be killed for a crime you didn’t commit?
Most people’s worst fear about capital punishment is that innocent people will be wrongfully convicted and executed. Unfortunately for Cameron Todd Willingham that fear became a reality.
Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 for allegedly setting a fire that killed his three young daughters 13 years earlier. He always claimed his innocence, and the arson investigation used to convict him was questioned by leading experts before Willingham was executed.
As of February 18, 2021, the DPIC (death penalty information center) added 11 cases to the innocent list, bringing the national death-row exoneration total to 185. This means that at least 185 Americans have been wrongfully executed for crimes they didn’t commit.
That is a minimum of 185 lives, that we know of, lost because of a combination of police/prosecutorial misconduct, perjury, and other false testimony. Data from DPIC now shows that 1 in every 8.3 U.S. citizens that were put to death by capital punishment have been proven to be innocent after they were put to death.
After analysis of the 185 innocent cases, a disturbing pattern of racial bias was revealed. With the death penalty being irreversible, sometimes racially motivated, and extremely expensive for taxpayers, is this really what we want as our “justice system” or is this just a sick and flawed form of revenge?
Most Americans are asking “Should the death penalty really be abolished?” The Supreme Court has held the death penalty to be constitutional. According to heritage.org, the 5th and 14th Amendments carry express approval of the death penalty: a person may not be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
For the death penalty to be applied fairly, the criminal justice system needs to work as it was intended. However, it is impossible for the death penalty to be applied fairly.
A nationally recognized arson expert said that Willingham’s conviction was based on flawed forensic analysis. Documents obtained by the Innocence Project show that state officials were aware of that report but apparently did nothing about it and took no action.
According to the DPIC “More than 15 percent of all death-row exonerations in the U.S. are in cases in which trial judges overruled jury recommendations for life or imposed the death penalty based on non-unanimous jury votes for death”, as well as not taking into account mental health, and perjury of evidence.
In subsection C of the U.S code 3596, Implementation of a sentence of Death, the law claims that “A sentence of death shall not be carried out upon a person who is mentally disabled.” However, most criminals have undiagnosed mental health issues and without access to a mental health professional the whole trial is questionable.
The death penalty is racist. While Todd Willingham was white, there have been many other instances where this was not the case. On January 11, 2019, the Florida Clemency Board granted posthumous pardons to the “Groveland Four.”
The four young African American men were falsely accused of raping a young white woman in Lake County, Florida in 1949. Not only were these four men killed but after the event a lot of racist hysteria occurred. DPIC said “white mobs burned down black residences, a massive white posse lynched a black suspect, all-white juries condemned two innocent men to death and an innocent teen to a life sentence, and a racist sheriff murdered one of the men and attempted to kill another.” One of the men tried to escape from custody but was reportedly shot 400 times.
Justice John Paul Stevens once wrote “That the murder of Black victims is treated as less culpable than the murder of white victims and that provides a haunting reminder of once-prevalent Southern lynching’s”.
A new study conducted by Scott Phillips & Justin Marceau at Harvard concluded that defendants convicted of killing white victims were executed at a rate 17 times greater than those convicted of killing Black victims. ACLU.org said “While on white victims account for approximately one-half of all murder victims, 80% of all Capital cases involve white victims. As of October 2002, 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims.” Even when asking my peers how they thought capital punishment was affected by race, they all replied by saying the U.S. criminal justice system is racist and unless its reformed, which is highly unlikely and will take years, the death penalty is completely unfair and has a dark pattern that is taking away lives that could possibly be innocent.
The death penalty is expensive. Many people believe that the death penalty is less expensive than housing and feeding someone in prison for life. In reality, the death penalty’s complexity and length drive costs through the roof, making it much more expensive. Over a dozen states have found that death penalty cases can be up to 10 times more expensive than comparable non-death penalty cases.
“We’ve had the death penalty since 1994, and we continue to pay for the process with little results…But we continue to cut the programs that could prevent these types of crimes” says Kansas State Senator Carolyn McGinn, a Republican, who sponsored legislation to repeal the death penalty in order to save funds. The prosecution and defense of capital cases costs $467,000 more per case than noncapital cases.
A capital case also involves increased court costs, as well as the need for a high-security, expensive death row — dollars our state could use to help victims’ families in a time of fiscal crisis.
Sadly, Cameron Willingham lost his life because of the judicial systems mistakes, is this really what we want for America? Cameron’s wife who was out Christmas shopping came home to find her three daughters dead, and her husband being accused of murdering them. She eventually lost an innocent Cameron and 13 years later his name was cleared. However, that’s 13 years too late. Execution is uncorrectable.
I asked students at NSU University School if they believed that the death penalty should be abolished, I found that all of them believed that we should get rid of it completely. Annie Schulze said, “A lot of people believe the death penalty is in-humane in the sense of just killing people, however I believe it to be in-humane because we free them in a sense of killing them, when instead they should be in jail, locked up.” Annie saw capital punishment as a form of revenge and would offer a sort of release to criminals instead of paying for their heinous crimes and rotting in a jail cell. A sentence of life without parole means exactly what it says — those convicted of crimes are locked away in prison until they die. However, unlike the death penalty, a sentence of life without parole allows mistakes to be corrected or new evidence to come to light and life without parole is far less expensive.
For those reasons, and for Cameron’s sake, the death penalty should be abolished.
Execute justice, not people.
