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Keeping The Death Penalty Essay

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The Death Penalty: Should We Keep the Death Penalty or Dismiss It?
Terrorist, murders, the sum at the bottom of the barrel. That is what represents those sentenced to capital punishment. Although the people on death row are there for serious crimes, like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was charged with terrorism in the Boston Marathon, some people are put on death row for crimes they did not commit. Ray Krone was sentenced to death for the murder of a female bartender in Arizona. He was on death row for 32 months until DNA evidence was found and he was exonerated. He now works with the Witness to Innocence project to help others that were also falsely convicted of crimes. Krone was lucky to have been exonerated before he was called for his execution, but others are not as lucky as he was. ("Ray’s Story: …show more content…

We see it on TV shows how the inject one syringe into the arm and in a matter of seconds, the prisoner is dead. Well that, in fact, is false. Several states use a “three-drug cocktail” for its prisoners. (Kendall, 2015) The first drug “is supposed to be an anesthetic that knocks the prisoner out; the second is a paralytic that prevents all movement; the third causes searing pain and stops the heart.” (Kendall, 2015) If the sedative wears off before the dosage is completed the prisoner would receive a painful death, which is possible if the injections are not administered correctly. The death penalty consists of 273 number of botched executions since 1900 and 7% attempted lethal injection failure. (Kendall, 2015) The average cost of executing a prisoner is $3 million, whereas keeping an inmate for life is $1.1 million. (Kendall, 2015) There are clearly some costs to using the death penalty as an option today. It is costly to a system that is not as funded in jail/prison space. The money that is allocated to the drugs could easily be allocated to prison reform, new prisons, and keeping life-sentenced

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Another reason that people on death row cost so much is because they will wait in prison for years before they are actually put to death. People who are on death row will spend their time in separate buildings specifically for death row inmates(Daniels). Ideally, we would be able to cut the cost of this by allowing death row inmates to stay in traditional prisons and once they are done going through the judicial process they should be put to death right away. There is no need to keep them alive for years after being proven guilty and put on death row. The government has made it so that no one is put to death that should not be and although this is very necessary and should be that way, it is

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“The 1989 execution of Ted Bundy cost Florida taxpayers an estimated $5 million” (Executing Prisoners). The death penalty opens many doors for appealing and often results in delaying the execution and costing the state a lot of money. The death penalty is an expensive process but for some criminals, like Ted Bundy, it is

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The costs of capital murder trials are more expensive than other murder trials for many of reasons. Often in murder trials where the death penalty is not being sought, the case never goes to trial and the offender pleads to a lesser degree of murder such as second degree murder or manslaughter. Depending on the location in the country, a prosecutor may be swayed politically or by the victim’s family to agree to life in prison without the possibility of parole. What makes a capital murder trial so expensive is “the high cost of crime scene investigations, pretrial preparations and motions, expert witness investigations, jury selection, and heightened death row security and maintenance costs” (Schmalleger & Smykla, 2015, p. 493). The overall

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That’s about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for forty years. By 2007, according to the American Bar Association, many counties were paying at least $100 per hour for a defense attorney dealing with the death penalty. The average cost of defending a trial in a federal death case is $620,932 about eight times a federal murder case in which the death penalty is not sentenced. Modern science has greatly enhanced our ability to distinguish the innocent from the guilty and to identify the mentally ill, but all of this costs

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Therefore, the death penalty should remain an option of punishment. There are many reasons why the death penalty is effective, one of them includes the fact that it brings a sense of security to the victims and citizens. Ny Times claims that “It is the only 100% guarantee that the criminal

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Joey Arbuckle Mr. Lealos English II, 2 17 September 2015 Capital Punishment Only 13 of 800 total prisoners sentenced to the death penalty in California have been . The amount of money spent keeping these prisoners on death row for all these years is over $4 billion (End the death penalty in California 2012). From having the death penalty, California has been wasting tax-payer’s money on repeal and living costs. California should abolish the death penalty because the prisoners cost too much and it does not deter criminals.

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1176 Words | 5 Pages

Another reason why the death penalty should be abolished, or at least taken into great consideration, is the fact that Americans are spending too much money and time on the injected drug. The drug used for the lethal injection is actually made up out of three different substances. An anesthetic, which is named pentobarbital, Pavulon, a drug that makes the subject’s body go into paralysis, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart from functioning. The reason that this “concoction” is being put into felon’s bodies is because the usual drug was supplied by Britain. Unfortunately, when Britain attained the knowledge that their drug was being used for the death penalty purpose they no longer shipped it to the US.

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How would you feel if someone in your family was a criminal so the government killed them? You would feel awful wouldn’t you. We should not have the death penalty! We should not have the death penalty because it is unconstitutional and makes us look bad, families are in enough pain, and Criminals can be used for other things. The death penalty is one of the worsts things the government could do to us.

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If the first drug wears off, which is not entirely unlikely, the prisoner will experience extreme searing pain and suffer greatly as they die. For example, in an Arizona case an inmate gasped for two hours before a coroner pronounced them dead and in an Oklahoma case, an inmate woke up during the execution and incurred great suffering while he died. In a 2015 case, Justice Kagan stated that if an anesthetic failed to take effect “the inmate would feel as if he were being burned alive.” The feeling of being burned alive would easily constitute both cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Breyer also argued he was almost certain that the courts had executed innocent people.

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Trauma and grief of a death of a family member is a never ending pain. Some families do not have the luxury of thinking about “Capital Punishment” knowing the criminals will receive their own sentence in prison.     From a financial standpoint, replacing the death penalty with the life imprisonment can saves taxpayer’s a great deal of money. Having a criminal on death row would cost approximately $93,018.00 per inmate to conduct what is a called a proportionally review (Times, 2007)(which determines if the death penalty is justified given the circumstances of the crime) this only depends on what crime the inmate commits.

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Defendants are also much more inclined to insist on a trial when they are faced with losing their life. The cost continues to add up even after the conviction, as there are constitutionally mandated appeals, which involve both prosecution and defense costs on top of the other costs. At the end of the day this means that the true cost of the death penalty includes all the added expenses of the “unsuccessful” trials where the death penalty is not achieved. Additionally if a defendant is convicted, but avoids the death sentence, the state will still have to pay for life imprisonment, as well as the increased expense for the

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Each death penalty case in Texas costs taxpayers about $2.3 million. That is approximately three times the cost of imprisoning somebody in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. That is crazy! The government could actually do something good rather than something flawed and hypocritical. Taxpayers complain about paying taxes.

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Connecting to the needles will be IV tubes which go through the wall which are attached to where the drugs are inserted (Death

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The major reason why the death penalty should be abolished is that the cost of the death penalty is too much and the USA is in debt to many other countries. What this means is that the death penalty should be abolished and also the cost death penalty is more than the cost of maximum sentence life in prison. According to J. Marceau and H. Whitson, “The Cost of Colorado’s Death penalty,” 3 Univ. of Denver Criminal Law Review “A new study of the cost of the death penalty in Colorado revealed that capital proceedings require six times more days in court and

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750 Words | 3 Pages

Death Penalty According to the 2010 Gallup Poll, 64% of the United State of America are supporting the death penalty, I as an American am part of that 36% that is against it. I do not believe that we as human being should determine whether another person should live or die. A second reason that I am against the death penalty is for the reason that the accused person could be innocent and normally the accused person only has one court presentation and is only judged by the judge not a jury of their peer, and is sent to death row where they pay for a crime that they haven’t done. My final reason that i do not believe that the death penalty should count as a punishment for the American people is because, a person that has done a massive massacre shouldn’t just be able to leave the world just like that without paying and suffering for what they have done, Or should the death punishment continue as it is for it has a great benefit to us as citizens of the United States.

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