SHOULD CAPITAL PUNISHMENT BE ABOLISHED WORLDWIDE?

WRITTEN BY RUFUS C – YEAR 8

Capital punishment is the legally authorised killing of someone for a crime Methods of capital punishment are hanging, the electric chair, the gas chamber, firing squad and most frequently used today; lethal injection. In 2021, China executed the most people in the world (more than 8000 people), Iran executed the second most with 314, then Egypt with 83. In this essay I will discuss and analyse whether the death penalty can ever be justified However, to answer this question we need to know why it is still validated when to kill someone is the ultimate punishment for a crime as it is irreversible and worse than any other punishment To justify sentencing someone to death you need to be 100% certain that it was them who committed the crime as you cannot take it back if you find out they’re innocent However, this is very hard as there is still always a chance that they were wrongly convicted. You must also know that they are not suffering any mental illness as if they are then they should be put in a secure psychiatric hospital and not on death row. If The death penalty is to exist, it must also be distributed equally and not in a racist way where some races or religions receive it significantly more than others.

In addition, you must also know whether it actually works and positively impacts the number of murders in that location After narrowing down who is going to be put on death row with all these justifications, there is going to be a very minimal amount of people who get sentenced to and killed by the death penalty So, is there really any point in having it?

In this paragraph I will discuss whether the death penalty is distributed equally and fairly across the whole population. Capital punishment is legal in 55 countries As of 2022, 2,414 convicts are on death row in America and an estimated 4 1% of these are innocent meaning that unless they are exonerated of their crime then approximately 100 innocent people will be killed, and 100 more people will get away with murder as the crime will no longer be investigated This is also a problem in China where since 2007 at least 8000 people have been executed each year and a staggering one in eight are believed to be innocent This means that by the end of this year 16,000 people in China will have been wrongly executed since 2007

Recently a Japanese man named Iwao Hakamada who was on death row for 45 years, was granted a retrial to prove his innocence He was released from prison in 2014 but he still wants to prove his innocence as new DNA evidence will cast serious doubt on his conviction, this shows that the court cannot always know who is guilty and who is innocent When considering racial bias, in the general US population 13% of people are black and 77% are white but of the death row inmates 38% are black and 59% are white which means that there is a definite racial bias in the court of law system This may be due to unconscious bias, but it is mostly due to racism which is incredibly unfair. In addition when looking at people with mental illnesses the death penalty is not applied fairly All states in the US have been urged by the UN Commission of human rights not to execute anyone with any form of mental disorder such as schizophrenia which can give you hallucinations Despite this, 5 to 10% of people on death row have a mental illness that may have caused them to kill someone or admit to something they didn't do. Approximately 10% of all homicides in the United States are due to people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder One example of this is David Berkowitz, more commonly referred to as Son of Sam, who killed six people in the 1970s claiming that his neighbour’s dog had told him to do it This shows that the death penalty is distributed unfairly and therefore should most certainly not be justified as many people who receive it are innocent and some races/cultures receive it more than others

One reason often used to support the death penalty is that it will deter people from committing murder However, I don’t think that it does For example, in America 24 states officially use capital punishment, the states with the highest murder rates are Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama and all of these states use the death penalty hence it hasn’t deterred people. You may think this is just chance, until you see the rest of the statistics and you see that the states with the death penalty usually have higher murder rates than those without Despite this there may be other reasons for these higher murder rates such as it is a poorer state, so they use the death penalty because they can’t afford to keep them alive in prison and since it is a poorer state people need money and sometimes the only way to get it is murder. I doubt this is the case though, because even some of the richest states like Wyoming use the death penalty and still have fairly high murder rates There are, however, a couple of anomalies to this rule for example in Utah they have the death penalty, but the homicide rate is only 2 9 per 100,000 Another anomaly is in Illinois where they have no death penalty, but the homicide rate is at 11.2 per 100,000. Overall, this means that the death penalty most certainly does not prevent homicide

Another justification for the death penalty is that it would be cheaper to execute the person who committed the crime as opposed to paying for their security and healthcare for 25 years or until they die in prison Overall, it costs very varied amounts of money to keep prisoners alive in prison per year ranging from $18,000 per prisoner in Mississippi to $135,978 per prisoner in Wyoming but the average cost per person per year in a high security prison is $106,131 as of 2022 in America

This means that it would cost over $2,000,000 to house a prisoner for 25 years. This whole idea that it is cheaper to execute someone may not be true though because of the monumental legal costs

This is backed up by a 2016 study by Lewis and Clark Law School and Seattle University where they found that court cases that result in death sentences are three to four times more expensive than those that don’t This higher cost is due to the requirement of appointment of death qualified defence lawyers and more complicated jury selection practices. After adding up all these costs it would cost around $315,000 for non-capital cases and $1 1 million for death sentences

As well as this it was estimated that it cost Pennsylvania approximately $816 million more to execute 408 people than it would to send them to life in prison without parole Furthermore, in Washington it cost them an average of $1,000,000 more to execute someone than a similar case where the death penalty was not sought which means that it does not cost less to execute someone than to keep them alive in prison In addition to the legal costs there has been a very dramatic increase in the price of the drugs used in the lethal injection This is shown in October 2020 when Arizona paid $1 5 million for 1 kilogram of lethal injection drugs (enough for 200 people). They were criticized by many people as they have only executed 3 people in the last 8 years This evidence suggests that it costs significantly more to execute someone than to keep them alive in prison until they die due to legal costs and the cost of the drugs Overall there are many reasons that the death penalty should be abolished worldwide I believe the most important reason is that it is occasionally given out incorrectly to people who have not committed the crime they were tried for

I also believe that it is given out unfairly to different races and religions due to racism

Another reason to abolish the death penalty is that it does not deter people from committing murder This is all still very relevant as in February 2023, MP lee Anderson has made a comment that “Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed” implying that he wanted to bring back the death penalty in the UK

In conclusion I think that capital punishment should be abolished because it is unevenly distributed, ineffective as a deterrent and more expensive than putting someone in prison for 25 years or until they die and therefore the death penalty can never be justified.