Is capital punishment Constitutional?  The short answer is that, yes it is.  The Supreme Court has ruled that intravenous execution is neither cruel nor unusual punishment.  The Court ruled on this many times and has always found that the act of executing a person was neither cruel nor unusual, though in the past some of the methods used for sentencing were unconstitutional. Many people argue that there is an evolving understanding of what is cruel and unusual, but at the same time people have been finding more and more humane ways to kill people.  The most common method right now is to pump them full of poisons.  The current drug has three parts.  The first part is a powerful anesthetic. After that drug goes into the person they can usually be considered dead, but just to be extra safe there is another drug pumped into the person that stops their heart and one to stop his lungs.  There have been botches when the drugs are old and the executed person starts to rasp or witnesses here sounds come out of the executed person, but the biggest problem is that sometimes the veins in a person’s arms have been damaged by other needles going into them.  Then they have to find other veins.  My mother’s client, the one she wasn’t sure had actually murdered the person he was executed for killing, had to have the injection through his feet.  This method has been found to be neither cruel nor unusual.  It is thus Constitutional.

The Supreme Court has ruled that it is cruel or unusual to execute certain people.  The mentally retarded can’t be executed. The Supreme Court determined that they could not be on account of the question of whether or not they can really understand what is happening to them.  The reasoning was that if they could not understand that they were being executed for their crimes then it was cruel to execute them.  A similar reasoning has been provided for minors , though they can be charged as adults most of the time for other crimes.  The idea of sentencing children to death is generally frowned upon as well.  Personally I find it strange that the mentally ill are able to be executed.  There is a very high bar for an insanity plea in a court room.  You would almost think that a person  who was mentally ill would fall into the category of unable to understand what is happening to them, but they haven’t been given that classification surprisingly.  The Supreme Court has also ruled that only certain kinds of crimes can be punished with execution.  A rape for example is not extreme enough to warrant a death sentence, but if the woman is then murdered it can warrant a death penalty.

As you know I usually try to find an argument against whatever I have said above. The only real argument I can come up with is that just because something is Constitutional does not mean that it is a good law.  Many people would argue that Obama-care is a law such as this.   I think that capital punishment was such as this.  We can execute people for murder, but that doesn’t make it a good thing or a large benefit to society.  That is how I feel on the issue of the Constitutionality of the death penalty.

This is my last post so i’m going to do some light iteration. I don’t like the death penalty.  I think that there is too much error for mistakes which can lead to more innocent people dying.  I know the cost of the death penalty is extremely large compared to the punishment of life without parole, and I don’t see a large enough difference between the results  of the two punishments to justify the costs.  I don’t know if capital punishment deters crime.  I know the death penalty is Constitutional, but I don’t think that means anything as to whether or not it should be in place.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/part-i-history-death-penalty

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/death_penalty

http://www.balancedpolitics.org/death_penalty.htm

Last time I wrote in response to what was commented regarding the actual costs of the death penalty and how they differ from the common misconception of its real price.  The answer was that the death penalty is more expensive than life in prison without parole.  I was then told to discuss the deterring effect of the death penalty on people.  That is what I will do now.

The question of whether deterrence actually works or not is significantly more mixed than the question of whether death is more expensive than life in prison .  Many studies have been inconclusive.  Others claim that the death penalty will deter up to eighteen people per execution.  People also argue that capital punishment will help to protect the inmates around the murderer, because they can’t actually kill anything when they are dead.  On the other hand there are many statistics that show that states without capital punishment tend to have higher instances of violent crimes.  The question of the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent is difficult to answer.

The first research that found that the death penalty did in fact deter crime was done by Isaac Ehrilich, an Economics professor.  While his findings were contested by other researchers both he and an independent researcher were successful in confirming those findings.  More recent research, done by a panel (the article doesn’t say what kind of people weer on the panel), have shown that on average each execution saves an average of 18 lives. Other studies, done by people with names that mean nothing to me, have found that there is a strong negative correlation between executions and murder incidents.   Another researcher, named Shepard was able to break down the murders deterred based on race, though he said only three lives were saved per execution.  He also found that the faster an execution occurs the more murders it deters.  He said that every 2.75 years shorter deters about one more murder.  This website has a lot more studies mentioned, but I see no real point in iteration and reiteration.  As a final comment on whether these statistics and studies are credible, I would like to state that this statistic is a difficult thing to measure.  How can somebody actually count the number of murders that did not occur.  I am not going to say that it is impossible to actually study and measure these statistics.  Keeping the difficulty in measuring these statistics, it is easy to explain the difference between the number 3 and the number 18.  That is a difference of 15 murders or of 600%.  As for my own feelings on these statistics , I find the difference in results disturbing.  I also don’t think that 3 deaths caused by an individual, whose job is not to protect the citizenry, is not worth the death of a potentially innocent person, caused by the government, whose entire purpose based on classical governmental philosophy ( Rousseau’s Social Contract) is to protect the citizens.

There are also people who just flat out refuse to give these studies any credibility.  According to an article by The Denver Post there is no credible evidence for deterrence.  It cites a report made by the National Academy of Sciences ( their mission statement can be seen here.  Please note that their primary focus is in the sciences) which states that every single study mentioned above and many others were done in a non-credible way.  I tried to track down the actual report referenced.  I found a book that was written by a subset of the NAS, the description of which said that there have been no credible studies done that have found a significant deterring effect.  I feel like what you choose to believe on this is all up in the air.  The studies may or may not be credible.  At the end of the day, it makes no difference in the larger view.  People will continually reference the studies regardless of credibility, and other people will constantly try to claim that the lack of credibility completely destroys that case.

Then there is the always present argument that states without the death penalty have lower violent crime rates than states with capital punishment.  This has been shown over and over to be true.  There is a logical fallacy associated with this.  It is post hoc ergo propter hoc.  We have observed that there is a correlation between the death penalty being in a state or not and the violent crime rate.  That doesn’t mean that the lack of a death penalty caused the lower violent crime rate.  That doesn’t mean that they are not related.  I would suggest the more likely link of causation would be the other way, assuming such a link exists.  In other words I think it is more likely that states with low crime rates feel they don’t need the death penalty so badly and thus remove it.  They may also just be connected by correlation rather than causation.

So where does that put us on deterrence?   There are myriad studies that suggest that deterrence is a real thing.  There is at least one study suggesting that all of those studies are not worth the paper they are printed on.  There is also a statistic that is referenced very often by people who claim that deterrence is not a valid theory.  This statistic is just a statistic which is probably not being interpreted correctly.  So… we have no idea how to measure the effectiveness of capital punishment on deterrence , and there are lots of studies that people on both sides of the argument use.  Personally, I feel that the entire argument going both ways should be treated as both alive and dead, like Schrodinger’s cat.  We just don’t know how to open the box to find out if the cat is alive or dead.  I think that the truth at the core of this argument should be a very important piece of the argument once we know how to open the box.  I think that until this factor is known the arguments based on it, both ways, should be given less value.

http://deathpenaltycurriculum.org/teacher/c/about/arguments/argument1a.htm

http://www.heritage.org/research/testimony/the-death-penalty-deters-crime-and-saves-lives

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_23374844/no-credible-evidence-whether-death-penalty-deters-experts#axzz2wTGdvvL8

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/death-penalty-not-a-deterrent_n_1434645.html

http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/mission/

Fox says “Every time a killer is sentenced to die, a school closes.”  In response to my last post at least 5 people commented on my thoughts and mentioned the economic benefits.  These actually do not exist.  It turns out that life without parole is less expensive than sentencing someone to death.  The execution itself is very cheap.   I will not deny that, but the inmates are not just wheeled out of the court room and given the needle.  These people have the rights to appeals and there is usually a longer trial for death penalty cases.  Because of the excess due process costs are driven way up.

A study done out of Duke University in 2010 claimed that North Carolina, just the state not the country, could save almost 11 million dollars per year by replacing all death penalty cases with life without parole ones.

Amnesty international even found that the greatest costs are not from the post trial appeals and procedures but from the actual trial and pretrial proceedings.  They argue  that “Even if all post-conviction proceedings (appeals) were abolished, the death penalty would still be more expensive than alternative sentences.”  These expenses are incurred when the prosecution seeks the death penalty regardless of the actual results of the sentencing.  So even if the sentence is only life without parole.

A more in depth breakdown of costs of the death penalty can be seen here.  Please note that the pretrial and trial costs are about 2 billion dollars while the costs for incarceration are about half that much at 1 billion.

My home state of New Jersey no longer has capital punishment.  We were the first state to abolish the death penalty since it was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976.  The main reason for our decision was that our last execution was in 1963.  We had 8 prisoners on death row, none of which were going to be executed in the foreseeable future.  Keeping the prisoners on death row was costing us $72,602 per year to house while keeping inmates in the general population costed $40,121 per year.  The total costs on the state were 253 million dollars since the state had reinstated it in 1983.  Remember that the state had executed a grand total of 0 people during that time.  I would love to tell you the cost per execution, but I can’t divide by 0.  Our 8 inmates were placed in the general population and their sentences were changed to life in prison without parole.

Taxpayers foot all of these bills.  They have to pay $90000 per inmate per year  more on death row inmates than normal inmates in California, but these funds could go to other issues like making prisons to prevent overcrowding and other sorts of societal problems.  Why should we pay that much more to kill people.  It doesn’t make sense.  The death penalty is supposed to completely remove the offenders from society and remove the cancer.  Life without Parole does the same thing but with less costs.

So, the cost of taking a man’s life is actually much more than to take the years remaining in his life.  I am aware that this is a rather one sided post, but I have failed to find a single statistic online that has in any way contradicted the above findings.  My home state abolished capital punishment for reasons similar to the ones listed above.  There is more research that I have done, and you can look at it all below, but I feel that reiteration of what are all essentially the same statistic is pointless.  Many sources can be connected to through here.  It is also a good summary of the above.  I am willing to here any thoughts or comments on the above

http://ejusa.org/learn/cost

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2011/09/22/death-and-taxes-the-real-cost-of-the-death-penalty/2/

http://news.sanford.duke.edu/news-type/news/2010/death-penalty-costs-nc-taxpayers-11-million-year

http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost

http://www.njadp.org/forms/cost/MoneyforNothingNovember18.html

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/1574

Click to access dpsc_final.pdf

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/13/AR2007121301302.html

The purpose of this blog is to discuss both sides of the issue of capital punishment as fairly as possible.  I am personally against the death penalty because of the finality of the punishment and the what if scenario.  I am honestly terrified of killing an innocent man.

This is unavoidable in the American legal system.  Some guilty men will not be punished for their crimes while others will be punished for crimes they did not commit.  According to the Innocence Project Statistics there have been 312 people who have been exonerated in the United States based on new DNA evidence.  18 of those who were exonerated were on death row.  That is a low number when compared to the amounts of people who have gone through the legal system.  I am still terrified because that means that 18 people had there lives saved because somebody looked at the DNA evidence.  Death penalty.org claims there have been 143 people exonerated while on death row.  This includes the 18 who were exonerated because of DNA evidence.  This is an excellent list of exonerated people.

If these people had been executed before being exonerated, and then found to be innocent, what could the state do to correct it.  They can’t say “O , Sorry we killed your husband/father/mother/wife.  We thought he burned down the house next door when there was an electrical issue.  Here is some money.”  That doesn’t work. The state can’t compensate time lost when somebody is exonerated after 10 years, the average time spent on death row before exoneration, but they can return the person to the world, and their family.

That being said, there are some people who just probably need to be taken away from the world.  My mother, a former paralegal, told me a story about a client she had who was executed.   She didn’t represent him in court.  He did that himself, which probably had a rather large impact on his sentencing.  He on his own would not have been so easily able to find mitigating factors to protect him from a capital sentence.  My mother just worked on his appeals.  She is to this day unsure whether he was guilty of the crime he was sentenced to death.  I can tell that it still haunts her.  She does know he had killed another woman in the past.  She does know that he was like a mad dog. He wasn’t good for society and needed to be taken out of it.  This man certainly did kill people in the past.  The question is not if he was a bad person.  Te question  is, was he a bad enough person to die for a crime he may not have committed.

The Justice system has always had a stronger focus on protecting the innocent than convicting the guilty.  That is why the jury must find a man guilty beyond a reasonable doubt rather than feeling that he is guilty.  On this particular aspect of the issue I have trouble yielding.  I invite anybody who can think of a way to make this less biased of an argument, but I can think of no adequate mitigating factors to help me escape the very biased argument I am presenting.  I promise to try harder to be less biased in the future posts.  This is really my big reason for being against the death penalty, and I can’t think of another way to look at the facts.  As far as I can see each individual must weigh the value of an innocent man’s life against the harm a free guilty man causes to society and find their own answer.  For me the price is just too high.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-list-those-freed-death-row

http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/DNA_Exonerations_Nationwide.php

http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-and-innocence

http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/DNA_Exonerations_Nationwide.php

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