Lethal Injection Under Fire Again

[Mithrandir]

What does the death penalty really solve? It doesn't deter crime. It costs much, much more to execute an individual than imprison them for life. It is applied completely arbitrarily. There were 123 death row exonerations since 1973.

When you throw in cases like what happened to Earl Washington ( link: http://www.nodeathpenalty.org/newab019/e...ngton.html ), I litterally feel sick to my stomach.

I've asked it in previous threads and I'll ask it again... Why are so many people so freakin' bloodthirsty? When does the cycle of murder and killing end? How is it justice to convict someone of a horrible crime against humanity - and then perform said crime against humanity on them in turn at greater expense and while admiting that there is the possibility of them being innocent? There's an identity crisis here.

Can we please just put the Middle Ages and Hammurabi behind us?

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/FactSheet.pdf

Consistent with previous years, the 2004 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, again had
the lowest murder rate.

• The California death penalty system costs taxpayers $114 million per year beyond the costs of keeping convicts locked up for life.
Taxpayers have paid more than $250 million for each of the state’s executions. (L.A. Times, March 6, 2005)
• In Kansas, the costs of capital cases are 70% more expensive than comparable non-capital cases, including the costs of incarceration.
(Kansas Performance Audit Report, December 2003).
• In Indiana, the total costs of the death penalty exceed the complete costs of life without parole sentences by about 38%, assuming
that 20% of death sentences are overturned and reduced to life. (Indiana Criminal Law Study Commission, January 10, 2002).
• The most comprehensive study in the country found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million per execution over the
costs of sentencing murderers to life imprisonment. The majority of those costs occur at the trial level. (Duke University, May 1993).
• Enforcing the death penalty costs Florida $51 million a year above what it would cost to punish all first-degree murderers with life in
prison without parole. Based on the 44 executions Florida had carried out since 1976, that amounts to a cost of $24 million for each
execution. (Palm Beach Post, January 4, 2000).
• In Texas, a death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million, about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at
the highest security level for 40 years. (Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1992).

In 96% of the states where there have been reviews of race and
the death penalty, there was a pattern of either race-of-victim
or race-of-defendant discrimination, or both. (Prof. David
Baldus report to the ABA, 1998).

I feel as though people pushing the "prisons are too cushy!" opinion are arguing from the wrong side of the issue on that one. Isn't it more a commentary on how #$%&ty our society is at the moment that people are *trying* to get thrown into jail just so they can have warm meals, air conditioning and a place to sleep? Heaven forbid California take that $114 million and put it into poverty-fighting programs.

It's just one ugly cycle: spend more money to execute people, therefore less support for the downtrodden, therefore more people turn to crime, therefore we spend more money to execute them, therefore there's even less money... Disgusting. It's the only word to describe it. Disgusting

Where's the "Arguing over the internet is like..." .gif when you need it? I need to remind myself every now and then or I get carried away over here on my soapbox.