Are you for or against capital punishment?

The death penalty is, to put it mildly, a form of mental torture. The imminent and absolute knowledge that you are going to die is torturous – while a soldier on a battlefield knows that there’s a chance he can survive, somebody on death row knows that, in the near future, he is going to be executed. People may say that they deserve to be tortured, but surely it is wrong to put criminals out of their misery so quickly. Why not keep them imprisoned and locked up in a cell for the rest of their lives rather than give them an easy way out?

As such, the death penalty is irreversible, and therefore wrongful executions are irreversible. Indeed, there are an alarming number of wrongful convictions associated with the death penalty. So far, more than 130 people who had been sentenced to death have been exonerated. A 2014 study has also found that over 4% of people executed were innocent. Also, in many cases, unlike those who have been sentenced to life in prison, it is impossible to compensate executed prisoners should they later be proven innocent. The state should not gamble with people's lives. The chance of wrongful execution alone should be enough to prove the death penalty is not justifiable.

Not only that, but juries are imperfect, and increasing the stakes of the verdict can pervert justice in a couple of ways. First, implementation of the death penalty is often impacted by jury members' social, gender-based or racial biases, disproportionately impacting certain victimized groups in society and adding certain arbitrariness to the justice system. A 2005 study found that the death penalty was three to four times more common amongst those who killed whites than those who killed African Americans or Latinos, while those who kill women are three and a half times more likely to be executed than those who kill men. And, as Bryan Stevenson, Professor of Law at New York University said, “the legacy of racial apartheid, racial bias, and ethnic discrimination is unavoidably evident in the administration of capital punishment in America. Death sentences are imposed in a criminal justice system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent. Embracing a certain quotient of racial bias and discrimination against the poor is an inexorable aspect of supporting capital punishment. This is an immoral condition that makes rejecting the death penalty on moral grounds not only defensible but necessary for those who refuse to accept unequal or unjust administration of punishment.”

Regional differences in attitudes towards the death penalty can also introduce elements of randomness into sentencing. For instance, in Illinois, a person is five times more likely to get a death sentence for first-degree murder in a rural area than in Cook County.

Third, the fear of wrongful execution can also pervert justice by biasing juries towards returning an innocent verdict when they would otherwise be deemed guilty. When they are told that the consequence of a guilty verdict is death, they are likely to find some kind of reasonable doubt to avoid being responsible for the death of that criminal. This means that more criminals who would've otherwise been convicted do not get charged. In this sense the death penalty can pervert the goals of justice and prolong the difficult process for victims' families.

Finally, the death penalty is incredibly costly in financial terms, which far outweighs the costs of alternative punishments such as life in prison. "Just one capital litigation can cost over $1 million as a result of the intensive jury selection, trials, and long appeals process that are required by capital cases.The cost of death row presents an additional financial burden associated with the death penalty. Savings from abolishing the death penalty in Kansas, for example, are estimated at $500,000 for every case in which the death penalty is not sought. In California, death row costs taxpayers $114 million a year beyond the cost of imprisoning convicts for life. This money could instead be better spent on measures that are of much greater benefit to the criminal justice system- greater policing, education, and other crime-preventing measures that are far more cost-effective."

Of course, those in favour of the death penalty will assert that it brings closure to the victims’ families. However, when we examine this claim, it is clearly false, as groups such as Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation show. Another claim that doesn’t meet its burden of proof is the claim that the death penalty deters crime – heinous crimes often take place in the heat of the moment without any consideration for legal repercussions. In addition, states such as Texas and Oklahoma, which have the death penalty, have higher crime rates than most states which do not.

Finally, they will argue that it is retribution for murders that have been committed by those on death row, but this is a ludicrous form of morality – do we go around burning arsonists’ homes, or stealing from burglars’ homes? Of course we don’t.