Benefits Of Abolishing The Death Penalty

There have been 158 exonerations in the US for the death penalty since 1973. That would have been 158 lives lost, 158 people knowing that they were innocent but couldn’t do anything about it. Capital crimes or capital offenses such as homicide and drug trafficking can result in the death penalty. Since 1999, death penalties have been mostly decreasing with only twenty of them in the year 2015. The death penalty should be abolished in the United States. The death penalty should not be allowed because no one has the right to end someone’s life, a wrongful execution wastes an enormous amount of money, and in cases of innocence, there is no way to correct the mistaken execution. First of all, it is unjust to kill someone, even a criminal, as
From deathpenalty.org, a 2011 study found that California spent more than four billion dollars on capital punishment. The cost of keeping a prisoner in jail for life is twenty times less expensive than having an execution occur. This justifies how abolishing the death penalty would be good for our society because those funds can be spent on education, helping hospitals, and jobs. From deathpenaltyinfo.org another study found that it costs about 1.94 billion for the pre-trial and trial costs, in total, everything would be 4.6 billion dollars. This cost is paid by tax money, that is 49 billion dollars that go towards killing someone, this shows that this money would be better off if it was spent on assistance for the poor and education. If the prisoner was later found innocent, and exonerated, 4.6 billion would go down the drain- money that could have been used for better effects and would have saved the life of someone
The unjust execution of an innocent person can never be corrected, leaving a horrendous wound. From the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (ncadp.org), Freddie Lee Pitts, a man who was exonerated from Florida’s death row (found innocent) was quoted saying: “You can release an innocent man from prison, but you can’t release him from the grave.” This confirms how killing an innocent person is not only destroying his life, yet the lives of friends and family because once a person has died, there’s isn’t a way to bring them back. Also from ncadp.org, Jerry Givens, a retired executioner said, “You sentenced a guy to be executed... then you send him to me to be put to death. Then later on... this guy was innocent... I’m going to suffer a lot because I performed the job.” This demonstrates that killing an innocent person cannot be undone. Wardens, executioners, and journalists experience forms of distress or turn to drugs, alcohol, or both. Without the death penalty, no one would need to go through pain comparable to that. Those last few minutes of life of innocent prisoners were horrid, knowing their innocence had shattered and there wasn’t anything to justify that they weren’t