Allow me to weigh in. One year in college in a statistics course that I took, we had to pick a topic, make an argument, and then draw correlations on data to give proper weight to our claims. I decided to research the validity of the death penalty and the things I learned were astounding. Part of the research I did included reading through several botched executions in our country. Some were horrifying to read. In the USA the AMA prohibits attending physicians in any way shape or form to participate in an execution as it goes against the ethical code doctors take here in the states. The people actually performing executions in this country are not allowed in any way, shape, or form as a result to take so much as a phlebotomy course (administering of needles.) Several countries that produce the barbiturate sodium thiopental, which is the final of the three drugs administered to stop the heart during an execution, will no longer sell to the US (Germany, Italy, and India) knowing that we use this for executions.
There is also a positive correlation between states that administer capital punishment and murders per 100k people. For example, the state of VA who supports the death penalty, and the state of NY who doesn't, shows a surprisingly lower number of murders per 100K. When you consider the actual data (and this was one argument I made in my paper) if the population of the state of VA was equal to the state of NY it would produce more murder's per 100K than NY currently does and that is considering that NYC is notoriously in the top 10 cities in America with a high crime rate.
The cost is also prohibitive. The state of California's death row system alone costs tax payers $300,000,000 dollars per year to house less than 20 inmates. This is nearly 12x what tax payers are paying for the remainder of the CA state prison system which is around $25,000,000. Several states, including the state of VA, refuse to produce moratoriums on the death penalty; as a matter of fact the Vet Association of VA has stated that the process of executing criminals in this state is unfit to euthanize a common house cat.
The ratio of death row inmates to other inmates is vastly smaller in this country, yet it costs us more to house them. The wiser thing to do is reconsider the insanely high rate of inmates that are in jail over simple possession (arrest for possession of a schedule I drug with no violent criminal activity) which would reduce the number of inmates in the prison system by 8587 in the state of CA alone (taken from an article I read back in March.)From there, we could carefully evaluate who should be moved to life in prison, which would drop the cost to tax payers drastically.
My suggestion is you read up on inmate Rommel Broom, held in Ohio. He is one of the few people in history who survived an execution. In his case, being a Heroin addict paid off, because they could not find suitable veins after nearly 2 hours of attempting to start the execution. He had to assist the executioners in finding suitable veins, because he was so frightened that he just wanted it over with. This man committed a heinous crime, but to those of you that think our system has a peaceful way of killing an inmate, you’re mistaken. This is just one case out of nearly 60 that I read where executions have gone wrong and the inmate either suffered excruciating pain, suffocation due to botched administration of paralytics, ect. so forth and so on. As a postscript to that story, the state of Ohio wants to attempt to execute him a second time, but has been blocked by the Supreme Court.
Don't get me wrong, I support the death penalty in some cases, such as war crimes or treason, but for the average offender, when one considers the amount of time the average death row inmate is usually on death row, the public defenders, the appellate process, you're looking at 10 years of support for a very expensive criminal. Life in prison costs far less and its reasonable in most cases of murder, when all of those factors are considered in context.
