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Abolish Capital Punishment Essay

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Capital Punishment
“Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?” (Heinlein, . In recent years, the use of the death penalty has slowly decreased, yet the flaws and failures of the system are more apparent than ever (NCADP, “About the Death Penalty”). The death penalty is a system that plays God, and should be eliminated because of wrongly accused inmates, the cost, and the harm toward prison workers.
To begin with, there are many cases when wrongly accused convicts are given the punishment of death. Since the restoration of the system in the United States, one in every ten people sentenced for the capital punishment has been set free because they were proven to be innocent (NCADP, “Exonerations of Men and Women”). Wrongly imprisoned people can be kept waiting for their punishment for many years (Ulloa, “Death Penalty Foes Keep Up the Fight”). According to Amnesty International’s document “Fatal Flaws: Innocence …show more content…

This money can be saved if we abolish the sentence. Researchers commonly study the cost of each case compared to providing for an inmate for life, and they have determined that a death penalty case is much more expensive than a case with a sentence for life (Lanier 25). NCADP says that in Washington it cost one million dollars more to execute than comparable cases where the death penalty wasn’t sought (“Cost”). For example, in California “death penalty has cost more than $4 billion since 1978”. If the death penalty is abolished it could save the state $170 million in savings per year (NCADP, “Cost”). Kansas’ death penalty cases cost four times the amount of cases where the sentence isn’t execution (NCADP, “Cost”). People commonly think that ending a criminal’s life would save money rather than keeping them alive in prison for the rest of their life, but they need to keep in mind that it is still a life, and human life is not

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