Benefits of the Death Penalty

Benefits of the Death Penalty The death penalty is a widely debated topic within the United States. While many people have different views of how constitutional it really is, others believe that criminals who commit a crime worthy of the death penalty are deserving of the punishment. However, the U.S. Supreme court determined that the penalty must be proportional to the crime, otherwise it violates the Eighth Amendment (Legal Information Institute). At this point, the main question really is: should the death penalty be allowed in the United States? When a crime worthy of the death penalty, (ex. terrorism, treason, perjury,) the criminal is tried by grand jury. Majority of the states allow methods of execution, with the exception of New Mexico and Connecticut (DPIC). Crimes are committed on a daily basis, some more intense than others. The death penalty is defined as the punishment of execution, administered to someone convicted of a capital crime. Once a jury has convicted a criminal, they go to the second part of the trial, the punishment phase. If the jury recommends the death penalty and the judge agrees then the criminal will face some form of execution, lethal injection is the most common form used today. From 1976 to 1995 there were a total of 314 people put to death in the US 179 of them were put to death using lethal injection, 123 were put to death using electrocution, 9 were put to death in a gas chamber, 2 were hanged, and 1 was put to death using the firing squad. In 2004, the murder rate in the US was 5.71 per 100,000 people of the population as against 4.02 per 100,000 in states that did not use it The average cost per year per prison is about $1 billion. By enforcing the death penalty and making it lawful can reduce that cost by almost half. Half does not sound like much in such large terms, but in reality it is an immense amount of money that the taxpayers can be using somewhere else. In fact, the cost of a system which

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