Argumentative Essay: The Effectiveness Of The Death Penalty

Ruben Cantun. Meeks Griffen. Jesse Tafero. 3 men, one of which was 17, who share one sickening similarity, execution. All three men had their lives taken away from them, leaving their loved ones with nothing but memories to grief on, but that's not where the similarities end, there's one more. They were innocent. All of them, and no amount of effort put will bring them back, but do you know what the most disturbing part is? They're not alone. According to a new study (in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) one in 25 individuals sentenced to death in the United States are later found innocent - and that’s only in one country. Among the innocent lay, fathers who will never be able to walk their daughters down the

But no, in reality that's not the case. Shocking right? It’s actually much more expensive to put someone to death than it is to sentence them to life without parole. According to deathpenalty.org, cases without any association to the death penalty costs $740,000 whereas cases with the death penalty being involved cost $1.26 million. As for the believed effectiveness of the death penalty, that too has been proved incorrect. In a recent survey by Professor Michael Radelet and Traci Lacock (of the University of Colorado) several criminologists from the American society of criminology (ASC) were sat down and questioned on which side of the spectrum they stood on when it came to capital punishment, 88% of the criminologists did not believe that the death penalty was an effective form of punishment as it did not deteriorate crime rates. If people who have dedicated their entire lives on studying criminals and crime rates belive the death penalty to be useless and that it should be abolished, then who are we to say it should

Not only has it been proven to fail to punish the correct perpetrator (multiple times) but in the long run it’s done nothing to help reduce crime rates, which is why I think of it as an obstacle in our path to justice and believe it should be abolished worldwide. I believe that in countries where capital punishment is still a widespread practice the government should look into abandoning this brutal act and settle for a feasible form of punishment such as life without