Why The Death Penalty Should Be Abolished

In the past year and a half, thirty three death row inmates have been executed by lethal injection. Criminals get on death row by performing harsh crimes; they await their execution usually well over a decade. Death row is a prison block or special section that houses prisoners that are sentenced to death. The death penalty and capital punishment should be abolished because it is very expensive, there is a possibility that the wrong person is convicted, and has no deterrent effect on crime rates. First, one of the factors on why the death penalty and capital punishment should be abolished is because it is very expensive. Performing one death penalty costs more than 740 thousand dollars. Taxpayers then have to pay ninety thousand more dollars per year per death row prisoner. Andrea Lyon, former director of the Illinois Capital Resource Center, has stated that a death penalty case carried to execution is three to four times more expensive than a regular murder case that ends with a natural-life sentence. In

Most of the time death row prisoners are innocent and have been framed. To be able to know if a person truly is guilty, there is a long, frustrating process that has to be done. Robert Kuttner, JEHT Foundation editor, believes that reforms, now implemented, require videotaping of confessions and sequential lineups of suspects because police have been known to manipulate prisoners into making false confessions, it is too easy for prosecutors to put a favorite suspect into a lineup with dissimilar ringers, and eyewitnesses make mistakes” (Kuttner). With the advanced technology there is today, there is still a chance that the person who has been convicted of the harsh crime is not the right guy. With not always being too sure, the death penalty should not be the resolution to the