Downside of The Death Penalty

The Death Penalty is capital punishment for high level crime such as murder, high-scale drug trafficking, etc. and has been used as a form of legal punishment for decades. Currently, the death penalty is legal in 30 states including California. There are different forms of capital punishment such as firing squad, electric chair, and lethal injection. Although lethal injection may seem the most humane out of all the execution types, there is a 7.12% botched lethal injection rate making it the type with the highest rate of failure. Many people have started to question if the Death Penalty actually decreases crime rates. To me, it seems hypocritical to punish a crime of murder by killing. If we want to teach not to kill, why would we enforce that by killing?

A report by the National Research Council, titled Deterrence and the Death Penalty, stated that studies claiming that the death penalty has a deterrent effect on murder rates are “fundamentally flawed” and should not be used when making policy decisions. The idea that death penalty has a deterrent effect supports the claim that the threat of the death penalty will deter people from committing crime and will reduce the probability and/or level of offending in society. The 2016 FBI Uniform Crime Report showed that the South had the highest murder rate. The South accounts for over 80% of executions. The Northeast, which has less than 1% of all executions, had lowest murder rate. There is no actual evidence that the death penalty has a deterrent effect and states with the death penalty in place do not have lower crime/murder rates than states without the death penalty.

Not only is the death penalty inhumane and unnecessary, but it is also extremely expensive. For example defense costs for death penalty trials in Kansas averaged about $400,000 per case, compared to $100,000 per case when the death penalty was not sought. (Kansas Judicial Council, 2014).