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Should the Death Penalty Be Abolished?

In its last six months, the United States government has put 13 prisoners to death. Do you think capital punishment should end?

By Nicole Daniels

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

In July, the United States carried out its first federal execution in 17 years. Since then, the Trump administration has executed 13 inmates, more than three times as many as the federal government had in the previous six decades.

The death penalty has been abolished in 22 states and 106 countries, yet it is still legal at the federal level in the United States. Does your state or country allow the death penalty?

Do you believe governments should be allowed to execute people who have been convicted of crimes? Is it ever justified, such as for the most heinous crimes? Or are you universally opposed to capital punishment?

In “ ‘Expedited Spree of Executions’ Faced Little Supreme Court Scrutiny ,” Adam Liptak writes about the recent federal executions:

In 2015, a few months before he died, Justice Antonin Scalia said he w o uld not be surprised if the Supreme Court did away with the death penalty. These days, after President Trump’s appointment of three justices, liberal members of the court have lost all hope of abolishing capital punishment. In the face of an extraordinary run of federal executions over the past six months, they have been left to wonder whether the court is prepared to play any role in capital cases beyond hastening executions. Until July, there had been no federal executions in 17 years . Since then, the Trump administration has executed 13 inmates, more than three times as many as the federal government had put to death in the previous six decades.

The article goes on to explain that Justice Stephen G. Breyer issued a dissent on Friday as the Supreme Court cleared the way for the last execution of the Trump era, complaining that it had not sufficiently resolved legal questions that inmates had asked. The article continues:

If Justice Breyer sounded rueful, it was because he had just a few years ago held out hope that the court would reconsider the constitutionality of capital punishment. He had set out his arguments in a major dissent in 2015 , one that must have been on Justice Scalia’s mind when he made his comments a few months later. Justice Breyer wrote in that 46-page dissent that he considered it “highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment,” which bars cruel and unusual punishments. He said that death row exonerations were frequent, that death sentences were imposed arbitrarily and that the capital justice system was marred by racial discrimination. Justice Breyer added that there was little reason to think that the death penalty deterred crime and that long delays between sentences and executions might themselves violate the Eighth Amendment. Most of the country did not use the death penalty, he said, and the United States was an international outlier in embracing it. Justice Ginsburg, who died in September, had joined the dissent. The two other liberals — Justices Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — were undoubtedly sympathetic. And Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who held the decisive vote in many closely divided cases until his retirement in 2018, had written the majority opinions in several 5-to-4 decisions that imposed limits on the death penalty, including ones barring the execution of juvenile offenders and people convicted of crimes other than murder .

In the July Opinion essay “ The Death Penalty Can Ensure ‘Justice Is Being Done,’ ” Jeffrey A. Rosen, then acting deputy attorney general, makes a legal case for capital punishment:

The death penalty is a difficult issue for many Americans on moral, religious and policy grounds. But as a legal issue, it is straightforward. The United States Constitution expressly contemplates “capital” crimes, and Congress has authorized the death penalty for serious federal offenses since President George Washington signed the Crimes Act of 1790. The American people have repeatedly ratified that decision, including through the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 signed by President Bill Clinton, the federal execution of Timothy McVeigh under President George W. Bush and the decision by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department to seek the death penalty against the Boston Marathon bomber and Dylann Roof.

Students, read the entire article , then tell us:

Do you support the use of capital punishment? Or do you think it should be abolished? Why?

Do you think the death penalty serves a necessary purpose, like deterring crime, providing relief for victims’ families or imparting justice? Or is capital punishment “cruel and unusual” and therefore prohibited by the Constitution? Is it morally wrong?

Are there alternatives to the death penalty that you think would be more appropriate? For example, is life in prison without the possibility of parole a sufficient sentence? Or is that still too harsh? What about restorative justice , an approach that “considers harm done and strives for agreement from all concerned — the victims, the offender and the community — on making amends”? What other ideas do you have?

Vast racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty have been found. For example, Black people are overrepresented on death row, and a recent study found that “defendants convicted of killing white victims were executed at a rate 17 times greater than those convicted of killing Black victims.” Does this information change or reinforce your opinion of capital punishment? How so?

The Federal Death Penalty Act prohibits the government from executing an inmate who is mentally disabled; however, in the recent executions of Corey Johnson , Alfred Bourgeois and Lisa Montgomery , their defense teams, families and others argued that they had intellectual disabilities. What role do you think disability or trauma history should play in how someone is punished, or rehabilitated, after committing a crime?

How concerned should we be about wrongfully convicted people being executed? The Innocence Project has proved the innocence of 18 people on death row who were exonerated by DNA testing. Do you have worries about the fair application of the death penalty, or about the possibility of the criminal justice system executing an innocent person?

About Student Opinion

• Find all of our Student Opinion questions in this column . • Have an idea for a Student Opinion question? Tell us about it . • Learn more about how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning .

Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

Life in Prison, or the Death Penalty?

What Chekhov has to tell us about capital punishment

The Anton Chekhov short story “The Bet” opens with a morbid dinner conversation. The guests debate which is worse—to rot in prison forever, or to be killed swiftly? The attorney general, Bill Barr, weighed in last week on the side of Chekhov’s banker, a rich man who favors capital punishment. (Barr announced that the federal government will resume killing those convicted of capital offenses, a practice it had stopped nearly 20 years ago.) At the banker’s table, a younger man disagrees. They make a bet: If the young man spends 15 years in the rich man’s guest cottage, with food and reading material of his choice slipped under the door but no other human contact, at the end of his captivity he will inherit a large portion of the banker’s fortune. He can leave whenever he wishes, but would then forfeit his prize.

If any crime deserves capital punishment, it is spoiling Chekhov stories, so I will not reveal much more. (You can read the whole story here , in about seven minutes.) The tale unfolds from the jailer’s perspective, and through lists of books the prisoner requests. The requests are fleeting silhouettes of the man, cast ever more enigmatically as his eager youth dissipates and he becomes, in isolation, something less or more than human. The banker and the prisoner both end up humbled, at various points, as they realize they had wagered confidently on matters they could not comprehend: death on the one hand, and the effects of long-term captivity on the other.

Garrett Epps: Debunking the Court’s latest death-penalty obsession

Barr, in his statement announcing the resumption of executions, showed no such humility. He gave, as a reason for the resumption, the fact that Congress has authorized executions, which seems to me a rather weak argument for killing a man. The Department of Justice press release also detailed the crimes of the five men whose deaths are now scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020. These lurid descriptions likewise fell short of a reason to kill the men, since no one disputed that they had committed heinous crimes, only that the federal government should kill them.

Where would Chekhovian humility deliver us? Faced with two alternatives—each a punishment whose consequences are inconceivable to punisher and punished alike—one option is to apply neither. I am in Norway, where the last person executed was a Nazi collaborator, Ragnar Skancke, in 1948, and even the most heinous crimes now receive a punishment of no more than 21 years (with extensions possible if the criminal remains a threat to public safety). Under this theory, both punishments contemplated by U.S. policy makers are like untested drugs. We have very little sense of what happens when you administer death or life imprisonment to a person, and rather than play Mengele, we should confine ourselves to punishments that are conceivable to us. Every adult has at least a sense of what 21 years feels like. One side benefit of this view is that the punishments are also more likely to be conceivable to the criminals, and a conceivable punishment may deter more effectively than one that is abstract.

Andrea D. Lyon: For Trump and Barr, executions are a statement

I am on Barr’s side, however, in one respect. There are crimes that deserve death, and indeed there are crimes that deserve a death at least as painful as the one dealt out regularly to death-penalty victims in the United States. Certain crimes are so depraved that merely to witness or read about them is to feel traumatized and victimized, secondhand. If you think no human deserves to suffer before dying, then I hope you never lose your innocence.

Some people deserve to be executed. But does anyone, or any state, deserve to be an executioner? That, I think, is a harder question, and I admit my moral hunches lead me to answer in the negative. But hunches aren’t persuasive as policy arguments, and Barr’s may well push him in the opposite direction. These hunches should be subjected to argument and consideration, of the type not evident in any of Barr’s comments about his own recent decision.

Some argue that the hangman performs a noble service, a professional duty that relieves him of moral burdens, just as a surgeon has no duty to investigate whether her patient deserves to be healed. One difference between a hangman and a surgeon, however, is that to kill a man nowadays requires relatively little expertise.

If we must choose between life imprisonment and the death penalty, then, I would suggest certain modifications of the latter, apart from the obligatory examination of whether it is applied fairly and accurately (which, by all evidence, it is not).

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If we are to have such a penalty, we should implement it in a way that forces more contemplation of the penalty by the citizens implicated in it. Conducting executions publicly would be one especially grotesque way—but it would also be imperfect, since anyone could just look away, and in any case, a public spectacle would further degrade the dignity of the victim and the proceedings. In classical Islamic law, executions and other punishments are required to be public, and in France, public executions continued until the Second World War.

Instead, I suggest, if we are to kill criminals, that the execution be conducted not by professionals, but by a randomly selected adult citizen. The model would be jury duty or conscription. If your number is called, you must report to the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, and be ready at an appointed time to read the sentence aloud to the criminal and press a button that sends pentobarbital into his veins. The duty would end once the selected citizen failed to find a pulse.

Samuel Johnson famously said that the prospect of an execution concentrates the mind wonderfully. The likelihood of selection, for any individual, would, of course, be infinitesimally low. But even the unlikely prospect of selection should concentrate the minds of citizens, too, and make the act of institutional killing slightly more conceivable. As Albert Camus wrote in “Reflections on the Guillotine,” “If people are shown the machine, made to touch the wood and steel and to hear the sound of a head falling, then public imagination [will be] suddenly awakened.” I see little to lose from more concentrated thought about life and death.

• Criminal Justice

Are Life Sentences a Merciful Alternative to the Death Penalty?

“it’s decades behind bars—with no way out.”.

Nathalie Baptiste

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Solitary confinement cell in New York Bebeto Matthews/AP

Once considered the death penalty capital of the United States, throughout its history Virginia has carried out more executions than any other state. Since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated the punishment, 113 executions have occurred there. But soon, when Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam signs the legislation that has passed the state legislature and is sitting on his desk, Virginia will join the 22 other states who no longer kill as a punishment. In doing so, it also will become the first southern state to abolish capital punishment completely. The sentences of the last two men remaining on the state’s death row—Anthony Juniper and Thomas Porter—will be automatically converted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

In the midst of these victories in the fight against capital punishment, many advocates are  attempting to address a different form of punishment, questioning how much more merciful life imprisonment is compared to the death penalty.

Life without parole has many of the same qualities that make the death penalty so abhorrent. Capital punishment is riddled with racial disparities, junk science, and a legal system that routinely fails the marginalized. “Those same exact flaws exist across the whole system,” says Ashley Nellis, a senior research analyst at the advocacy organization The Sentencing Project. Looked at logically, staying alive, albeit in prison, just has to be a better outcome than being executed. But looked at more closely, is the lesser sentence really “better” than the harshest one? “I would not call it a humane alternative to the death penalty,” Shari Silberstein, the executive director of the Equal Justice USA, a criminal justice nonprofit, tells me. In fact, it’s a punishment both extreme and one that disproportionately affects the most marginalized people. 

Despite the Trump administration’s last-minute killing spree on the federal level, the death penalty has never been more unpopular. In the last five years, f our states have repealed the death penalty altogether, and many more haven’t held an execution in years. President Joe Biden, once a champion of harsh punishments , is the first president to oppose capital punishment and has pledged to abolish the federal death penalty. Wyoming and Ohio lawmakers have introduced legislation in their respective states to end the practice as well. All this activism to end the cruelest and most controversial punishment in the American criminal justice system has somehow left life without parole as the next best alternative—but a recent report from The Sentencing Project shows that for many compelling reasons, the punishment has a number of attributes that could compare in cruelty to death sentences.

In 2019, I began thinking about the implications of life in prison after spending some time in Nashville when Don Johnson was executed for the 1984 murder of his wife. After the governor declined to commute Johnson’s sentence, and he was put to death after more than 30 years on death row , I thought about the alternative activists and Johnson’s friends had called for. Call off the execution, they urged. Let Don live—until he died in prison of natural causes. But even a life spent behind bars has its own set of cruelties.

According to The Sentencing Project, more than 200,000 people are serving those life sentences, which means life without parole, life with parole, or virtual life sentences—in which someone is sentenced to 50 years or more. They represent one out of seven people in prison, and there are 22 times more people serving life without parole than the population of people awaiting death. Thirty percent of lifers are 55 years of age or older, and nearly 4,000 inmates serving life were convicted of a drug-related offense; 8,600 people serving life with the possibility of parole or virtual life were sentenced as minors.

The racial bias in the death penalty has been well-documented. Half of all murder victims are white, but 80 percent of capital trials involve white victims. Since 1976, 21 white defendants with a Black victim have been executed compared to 297 Black defendants whose victims were white. But, as Nellis tells me, “All of the arguments one makes for eliminating the death penalty are also true for life in prison.” Racial disparities also plague those sentenced to a life behind bars: More than two-thirds of people serving life are people of color. One out of every five Black men in prison are serving life sentences, and Latinx people make up 16 percent of the lifer population.

Throughout the United States’ criminal justice system, conditions for people serving life sentences vary depending on the state. But frequently those conditions can be just as harsh as those for inmates on death row, especially the pervasive use of solitary confinement. A 2013 study by the ACLU found that 93 percent of the 3,000 people awaiting death in prison are locked in their cells for 22 to 24 hours a day.  Studies have shown that even a short period of time in solitary can cause psychological trauma resulting in hallucinations, panic attacks, and paranoia, not to mention an increased risk of suicide.

Only Connecticut enshrines solitary confinement for lifers in law, but it is routinely practiced elsewhere. As the Marshall Project reported , in 1987 William Blake facing drug charges in New York, shot and killed a police officer in a failed escape attempt. Unable to give Blake the death penalty, because the state had abolished capital punishment, the judge sentenced him to 77 years in prison. Deemed a high risk because of his first escape attempt, Blake now spends his days in solitary confinement in an area of the prison called the “Special Housing Units.” He once wrote, in an essay that was published in Solitary Watch, a project that showcases voices from solitary confinement: “Dying couldn’t take but a short time if you or the State were to kill me; in SHU I have died a thousand internal deaths.”

Then there is the 2010 case of Kalief Browder who spent three years in solitary confinement at Rikers Island in New York after being arrested for stealing a backpack—which he did not steal—at the age of 16. When he was finally released, he died by suicide two years later . Browder’s family believe that the intense torture and pain of those three isolated years drove him to take his own life. “Prison is a traumatizing place,” Silberstein says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re there for a year or the rest of your life.”

The legal options for those who are sentenced to life without parole are also far more limited than for those who are sentenced to death. Once someone is sentenced to death, the appeals process offers the defendant and his team of lawyers the opportunity to appeal the sentence, usually attempting to overturn it. If the state is going to put someone to death, the reasoning goes, it should be sure that the conviction is fair.

Clearly the system is far from perfect. Studies estimate that 4 percent of the people on death row are innocent; as of 2021, 185 death row inmates have been exonerated. Capital murder trials are plagued with police misconduct, false testimonies, and the use of questionable scientific evidence. I’ve written about executions of inmates with intellectual disabilities , severe illness , and ones with incompetent lawyers . But still, legal mechanisms to challenge the sentences exist—which does not occur for most lifers. In these cases, Nellis explains, “you don’t have capital-skilled attorneys, and you don’t have unlimited appeals.” Recently some states, like Michigan , have begun reviewing the life sentences for juveniles, but even then, many of those inmates have a short period of time in which to file their challenges, have trouble finding lawyers, and end up being unable to file appeals. “You have even fewer protections,” if you’re serving a life sentence, Nellis says. “It’s decades behind bars—with no way out.”

For Silberstein, anti-death penalty activists shouldn’t focus solely on life without parole as an alternative to the death penalty, but they should consider an entire reconfiguration of what justice means, and what it should look like. After someone has been harmed, “there’s a need for healing, safety, accountability, and a sense of justice,” she explains. But it is unrealistic to expect “that a prison sentence can meet all of those needs.” Clearly, they haven’t, she notes. Harsh sentences persevere, even in places where the death penalty has already been abolished because of the underlying belief that, as Silberstein explains succinctly, “The only sense that justice has been done is if someone else suffers.”

Perhaps now—when execution as a punishment has never seemed so obscene and unacceptable—it’s the right time to reconsider all  punishments. What is the real difference between spending years behind bars only to die strapped to a gurney while correctional staff administer enough drugs to kill you, and languishing behind bars until so-called natural causes finally, mercifully, takes your life? Are these differences sufficient to end one punishment and while still justifying another? If the United States is on the cusp of abolishing the death penalty, perhaps it should take the next logical step and abolish another form of cruel and unusual punishment as well: life imprisonment.

Biden Once Championed the Death Penalty. Now He Wants to Stop Trump’s Execution Spree.

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The Cruel Durability of Capital Punishment

New Hampshire Lawmakers Just Overrode the Republican Governor’s Veto and Abolished the Death Penalty

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Arguments for and Against the Death Penalty

Click the buttons below to view arguments and testimony on each topic.

The death penalty deters future murders.

Society has always used punishment to discourage would-be criminals from unlawful action. Since society has the highest interest in preventing murder, it should use the strongest punishment available to deter murder, and that is the death penalty. If murderers are sentenced to death and executed, potential murderers will think twice before killing for fear of losing their own life.

For years, criminologists analyzed murder rates to see if they fluctuated with the likelihood of convicted murderers being executed, but the results were inconclusive. Then in 1973 Isaac Ehrlich employed a new kind of analysis which produced results showing that for every inmate who was executed, 7 lives were spared because others were deterred from committing murder. Similar results have been produced by disciples of Ehrlich in follow-up studies.

Moreover, even if some studies regarding deterrence are inconclusive, that is only because the death penalty is rarely used and takes years before an execution is actually carried out. Punishments which are swift and sure are the best deterrent. The fact that some states or countries which do not use the death penalty have lower murder rates than jurisdictions which do is not evidence of the failure of deterrence. States with high murder rates would have even higher rates if they did not use the death penalty.

Ernest van den Haag, a Professor of Jurisprudence at Fordham University who has studied the question of deterrence closely, wrote: “Even though statistical demonstrations are not conclusive, and perhaps cannot be, capital punishment is likely to deter more than other punishments because people fear death more than anything else. They fear most death deliberately inflicted by law and scheduled by the courts. Whatever people fear most is likely to deter most. Hence, the threat of the death penalty may deter some murderers who otherwise might not have been deterred. And surely the death penalty is the only penalty that could deter prisoners already serving a life sentence and tempted to kill a guard, or offenders about to be arrested and facing a life sentence. Perhaps they will not be deterred. But they would certainly not be deterred by anything else. We owe all the protection we can give to law enforcers exposed to special risks.”

Finally, the death penalty certainly “deters” the murderer who is executed. Strictly speaking, this is a form of incapacitation, similar to the way a robber put in prison is prevented from robbing on the streets. Vicious murderers must be killed to prevent them from murdering again, either in prison, or in society if they should get out. Both as a deterrent and as a form of permanent incapacitation, the death penalty helps to prevent future crime.

Those who believe that deterrence justifies the execution of certain offenders bear the burden of proving that the death penalty is a deterrent. The overwhelming conclusion from years of deterrence studies is that the death penalty is, at best, no more of a deterrent than a sentence of life in prison. The Ehrlich studies have been widely discredited. In fact, some criminologists, such as William Bowers of Northeastern University, maintain that the death penalty has the opposite effect: that is, society is brutalized by the use of the death penalty, and this increases the likelihood of more murder. Even most supporters of the death penalty now place little or no weight on deterrence as a serious justification for its continued use.

States in the United States that do not employ the death penalty generally have lower murder rates than states that do. The same is true when the U.S. is compared to countries similar to it. The U.S., with the death penalty, has a higher murder rate than the countries of Europe or Canada, which do not use the death penalty.

The death penalty is not a deterrent because most people who commit murders either do not expect to be caught or do not carefully weigh the differences between a possible execution and life in prison before they act. Frequently, murders are committed in moments of passion or anger, or by criminals who are substance abusers and acted impulsively. As someone who presided over many of Texas’s executions, former Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox has remarked, “It is my own experience that those executed in Texas were not deterred by the existence of the death penalty law. I think in most cases you’ll find that the murder was committed under severe drug and alcohol abuse.”

There is no conclusive proof that the death penalty acts as a better deterrent than the threat of life imprisonment. A 2012 report released by the prestigious National Research Council of the National Academies and based on a review of more than three decades of research, concluded that studies claiming a deterrent effect on murder rates from the death penalty are fundamentally flawed. A survey of the former and present presidents of the country’s top academic criminological societies found that 84% of these experts rejected the notion that research had demonstrated any deterrent effect from the death penalty .

Once in prison, those serving life sentences often settle into a routine and are less of a threat to commit violence than other prisoners. Moreover, most states now have a sentence of life without parole. Prisoners who are given this sentence will never be released. Thus, the safety of society can be assured without using the death penalty.

Ernest van den Haag Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy, Fordham University. Excerpts from ” The Ultimate Punishment: A Defense,” (Harvard Law Review Association, 1986)

“Execution of those who have committed heinous murders may deter only one murder per year. If it does, it seems quite warranted. It is also the only fitting retribution for murder I can think of.”

“Most abolitionists acknowledge that they would continue to favor abolition even if the death penalty were shown to deter more murders than alternatives could deter. Abolitionists appear to value the life of a convicted murderer or, at least, his non-execution, more highly than they value the lives of the innocent victims who might be spared by deterring prospective murderers.

Deterrence is not altogether decisive for me either. I would favor retention of the death penalty as retribution even if it were shown that the threat of execution could not deter prospective murderers not already deterred by the threat of imprisonment. Still, I believe the death penalty, because of its finality, is more feared than imprisonment, and deters some prospective murderers not deterred by the thought of imprisonment. Sparing the lives of even a few prospective victims by deterring their murderers is more important than preserving the lives of convicted murderers because of the possibility, or even the probability, that executing them would not deter others. Whereas the life of the victims who might be saved are valuable, that of the murderer has only negative value, because of his crime. Surely the criminal law is meant to protect the lives of potential victims in preference to those of actual murderers.”

“We threaten punishments in order to deter crime. We impose them not only to make the threats credible but also as retribution (justice) for the crimes that were not deterred. Threats and punishments are necessary to deter and deterrence is a sufficient practical justification for them. Retribution is an independent moral justification. Although penalties can be unwise, repulsive, or inappropriate, and those punished can be pitiable, in a sense the infliction of legal punishment on a guilty person cannot be unjust. By committing the crime, the criminal volunteered to assume the risk of receiving a legal punishment that he could have avoided by not committing the crime. The punishment he suffers is the punishment he voluntarily risked suffering and, therefore, it is no more unjust to him than any other event for which one knowingly volunteers to assume the risk. Thus, the death penalty cannot be unjust to the guilty criminal.”

Full text can be found at PBS.org .

Hugo Adam Bedau (deceased) Austin Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University Excerpts from “The Case Against The Death Penalty” (Copyright 1997, American Civil Liberties Union)

“Persons who commit murder and other crimes of personal violence either may or may not premeditate their crimes.

When crime is planned, the criminal ordinarily concentrates on escaping detection, arrest, and conviction. The threat of even the severest punishment will not discourage those who expect to escape detection and arrest. It is impossible to imagine how the threat of any punishment could prevent a crime that is not premeditated….

Most capital crimes are committed in the heat of the moment. Most capital crimes are committed during moments of great emotional stress or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, when logical thinking has been suspended. In such cases, violence is inflicted by persons heedless of the consequences to themselves as well as to others….

If, however, severe punishment can deter crime, then long-term imprisonment is severe enough to deter any rational person from committing a violent crime.

The vast preponderance of the evidence shows that the death penalty is no more effective than imprisonment in deterring murder and that it may even be an incitement to criminal violence. Death-penalty states as a group do not have lower rates of criminal homicide than non-death-penalty states….

On-duty police officers do not suffer a higher rate of criminal assault and homicide in abolitionist states than they do in death-penalty states. Between l973 and l984, for example, lethal assaults against police were not significantly more, or less, frequent in abolitionist states than in death-penalty states. There is ‘no support for the view that the death penalty provides a more effective deterrent to police homicides than alternative sanctions. Not for a single year was evidence found that police are safer in jurisdictions that provide for capital punishment.’ (Bailey and Peterson, Criminology (1987))

Prisoners and prison personnel do not suffer a higher rate of criminal assault and homicide from life-term prisoners in abolition states than they do in death-penalty states. Between 1992 and 1995, 176 inmates were murdered by other prisoners; the vast majority (84%) were killed in death penalty jurisdictions. During the same period about 2% of all assaults on prison staff were committed by inmates in abolition jurisdictions. Evidently, the threat of the death penalty ‘does not even exert an incremental deterrent effect over the threat of a lesser punishment in the abolitionist states.’ (Wolfson, in Bedau, ed., The Death Penalty in America, 3rd ed. (1982))

Actual experience thus establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the death penalty does not deter murder. No comparable body of evidence contradicts that conclusion.”

Click here for the full text from the ACLU website.

Retribution

A just society requires the taking of a life for a life.

When someone takes a life, the balance of justice is disturbed. Unless that balance is restored, society succumbs to a rule of violence. Only the taking of the murderer’s life restores the balance and allows society to show convincingly that murder is an intolerable crime which will be punished in kind.

Retribution has its basis in religious values, which have historically maintained that it is proper to take an “eye for an eye” and a life for a life.

Although the victim and the victim’s family cannot be restored to the status which preceded the murder, at least an execution brings closure to the murderer’s crime (and closure to the ordeal for the victim’s family) and ensures that the murderer will create no more victims.

For the most cruel and heinous crimes, the ones for which the death penalty is applied, offenders deserve the worst punishment under our system of law, and that is the death penalty. Any lesser punishment would undermine the value society places on protecting lives.

Robert Macy, District Attorney of Oklahoma City, described his concept of the need for retribution in one case: “In 1991, a young mother was rendered helpless and made to watch as her baby was executed. The mother was then mutilated and killed. The killer should not lie in some prison with three meals a day, clean sheets, cable TV, family visits and endless appeals. For justice to prevail, some killers just need to die.”

Retribution is another word for revenge. Although our first instinct may be to inflict immediate pain on someone who wrongs us, the standards of a mature society demand a more measured response.

The emotional impulse for revenge is not a sufficient justification for invoking a system of capital punishment, with all its accompanying problems and risks. Our laws and criminal justice system should lead us to higher principles that demonstrate a complete respect for life, even the life of a murderer. Encouraging our basest motives of revenge, which ends in another killing, extends the chain of violence. Allowing executions sanctions killing as a form of ‘pay-back.’

Many victims’ families denounce the use of the death penalty. Using an execution to try to right the wrong of their loss is an affront to them and only causes more pain. For example, Bud Welch’s daughter, Julie, was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Although his first reaction was to wish that those who committed this terrible crime be killed, he ultimately realized that such killing “is simply vengeance; and it was vengeance that killed Julie…. Vengeance is a strong and natural emotion. But it has no place in our justice system.”

The notion of an eye for an eye, or a life for a life, is a simplistic one which our society has never endorsed. We do not allow torturing the torturer, or raping the rapist. Taking the life of a murderer is a similarly disproportionate punishment, especially in light of the fact that the U.S. executes only a small percentage of those convicted of murder, and these defendants are typically not the worst offenders but merely the ones with the fewest resources to defend themselves.

Louis P. Pojman Author and Professor of Philosophy, U.S. Military Academy. Excerpt from “The Death Penalty: For and Against,” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998)

“[Opponents of the capital punishment often put forth the following argument:] Perhaps the murderer deserves to die, but what authority does the state have to execute him or her? Both the Old and New Testament says, “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Prov. 25:21 and Romans 12:19). You need special authority to justify taking the life of a human being.

The objector fails to note that the New Testament passage continues with a support of the right of the state to execute criminals in the name of God: “Let every person be subjected to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment…. If you do wrong, be afraid, for [the authority] does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13: 1-4). So, according to the Bible, the authority to punish, which presumably includes the death penalty, comes from God.

But we need not appeal to a religious justification for capital punishment. We can site the state’s role in dispensing justice. Just as the state has the authority (and duty) to act justly in allocating scarce resources, in meeting minimal needs of its (deserving) citizens, in defending its citizens from violence and crime, and in not waging unjust wars; so too does it have the authority, flowing from its mission to promote justice and the good of its people, to punish the criminal. If the criminal, as one who has forfeited a right to life, deserves to be executed, especially if it will likely deter would-be murderers, the state has a duty to execute those convicted of first-degree murder.”

National Council of Synagogues and the Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops Excerpts from “To End the Death Penalty: A Report of the National Jewish/Catholic Consultation” (December, 1999)

“Some would argue that the death penalty is needed as a means of retributive justice, to balance out the crime with the punishment. This reflects a natural concern of society, and especially of victims and their families. Yet we believe that we are called to seek a higher road even while punishing the guilty, for example through long and in some cases life-long incarceration, so that the healing of all can ultimately take place.

Some would argue that the death penalty will teach society at large the seriousness of crime. Yet we say that teaching people to respond to violence with violence will, again, only breed more violence.

The strongest argument of all [in favor of the death penalty] is the deep pain and grief of the families of victims, and their quite natural desire to see punishment meted out to those who have plunged them into such agony. Yet it is the clear teaching of our traditions that this pain and suffering cannot be healed simply through the retribution of capital punishment or by vengeance. It is a difficult and long process of healing which comes about through personal growth and God’s grace. We agree that much more must be done by the religious community and by society at large to solace and care for the grieving families of the victims of violent crime.

Recent statements of the Reform and Conservative movements in Judaism, and of the U.S. Catholic Conference sum up well the increasingly strong convictions shared by Jews and Catholics…:

‘Respect for all human life and opposition to the violence in our society are at the root of our long-standing opposition (as bishops) to the death penalty. We see the death penalty as perpetuating a cycle of violence and promoting a sense of vengeance in our culture. As we said in Confronting the Culture of Violence: ‘We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing.’ We oppose capital punishment not just for what it does to those guilty of horrible crimes, but for what it does to all of us as a society. Increasing reliance on the death penalty diminishes all of us and is a sign of growing disrespect for human life. We cannot overcome crime by simply executing criminals, nor can we restore the lives of the innocent by ending the lives of those convicted of their murders. The death penalty offers the tragic illusion that we can defend life by taking life.’1

We affirm that we came to these conclusions because of our shared understanding of the sanctity of human life. We have committed ourselves to work together, and each within our own communities, toward ending the death penalty.” Endnote 1. Statement of the Administrative Committee of the United States Catholic Conference, March 24, 1999.

The risk of executing the innocent precludes the use of the death penalty.

The death penalty alone imposes an irrevocable sentence. Once an inmate is executed, nothing can be done to make amends if a mistake has been made. There is considerable evidence that many mistakes have been made in sentencing people to death. Since 1973, over 180 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged. During the same period of time, over 1,500 people have been executed. Thus, for every 8.3 people executed, we have found one person on death row who never should have been convicted. These statistics represent an intolerable risk of executing the innocent. If an automobile manufacturer operated with similar failure rates, it would be run out of business.

Our capital punishment system is unreliable. A study by Columbia University Law School found that two thirds of all capital trials contained serious errors. When the cases were retried, over 80% of the defendants were not sentenced to death and 7% were completely acquitted.

Many of the releases of innocent defendants from death row came about as a result of factors outside of the justice system. Recently, journalism students in Illinois were assigned to investigate the case of a man who was scheduled to be executed, after the system of appeals had rejected his legal claims. The students discovered that one witness had lied at the original trial, and they were able to find another man, who confessed to the crime on videotape and was later convicted of the murder. The innocent man who was released was very fortunate, but he was spared because of the informal efforts of concerned citizens, not because of the justice system.

In other cases, DNA testing has exonerated death row inmates. Here, too, the justice system had concluded that these defendants were guilty and deserving of the death penalty. DNA testing became available only in the early 1990s, due to advancements in science. If this testing had not been discovered until ten years later, many of these inmates would have been executed. And if DNA testing had been applied to earlier cases where inmates were executed in the 1970s and 80s, the odds are high that it would have proven that some of them were innocent as well.

Society takes many risks in which innocent lives can be lost. We build bridges, knowing that statistically some workers will be killed during construction; we take great precautions to reduce the number of unintended fatalities. But wrongful executions are a preventable risk. By substituting a sentence of life without parole, we meet society’s needs of punishment and protection without running the risk of an erroneous and irrevocable punishment.

There is no proof that any innocent person has actually been executed since increased safeguards and appeals were added to our death penalty system in the 1970s. Even if such executions have occurred, they are very rare. Imprisoning innocent people is also wrong, but we cannot empty the prisons because of that minimal risk. If improvements are needed in the system of representation, or in the use of scientific evidence such as DNA testing, then those reforms should be instituted. However, the need for reform is not a reason to abolish the death penalty.

Besides, many of the claims of innocence by those who have been released from death row are actually based on legal technicalities. Just because someone’s conviction is overturned years later and the prosecutor decides not to retry him, does not mean he is actually innocent.

If it can be shown that someone is innocent, surely a governor would grant clemency and spare the person. Hypothetical claims of innocence are usually just delaying tactics to put off the execution as long as possible. Given our thorough system of appeals through numerous state and federal courts, the execution of an innocent individual today is almost impossible. Even the theoretical execution of an innocent person can be justified because the death penalty saves lives by deterring other killings.

Gerald Kogan, Former Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Excerpts from a speech given in Orlando, Florida, October 23, 1999 “[T]here is no question in my mind, and I can tell you this having seen the dynamics of our criminal justice system over the many years that I have been associated with it, [as] prosecutor, defense attorney, trial judge and Supreme Court Justice, that convinces me that we certainly have, in the past, executed those people who either didn’t fit the criteria for execution in the State of Florida or who, in fact, were, factually, not guilty of the crime for which they have been executed.

“And you can make these statements when you understand the dynamics of the criminal justice system, when you understand how the State makes deals with more culpable defendants in a capital case, offers them light sentences in exchange for their testimony against another participant or, in some cases, in fact, gives them immunity from prosecution so that they can secure their testimony; the use of jailhouse confessions, like people who say, ‘I was in the cell with so-and-so and they confessed to me,’ or using those particular confessions, the validity of which there has been great doubt. And yet, you see the uneven application of the death penalty where, in many instances, those that are the most culpable escape death and those that are the least culpable are victims of the death penalty. These things begin to weigh very heavily upon you. And under our system, this is the system we have. And that is, we are human beings administering an imperfect system.”

“And how about those people who are still sitting on death row today, who may be factually innocent but cannot prove their particular case very simply because there is no DNA evidence in their case that can be used to exonerate them? Of course, in most cases, you’re not going to have that kind of DNA evidence, so there is no way and there is no hope for them to be saved from what may be one of the biggest mistakes that our society can make.”

The entire speech by Justice Kogan is available here.

Paul G. Cassell Associate Professor of Law, University of Utah, College of Law, and former law clerk to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Statement before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights Concerning Claims of Innocence in Capital Cases (July 23, 1993)

“Given the fallibility of human judgments, the possibility exists that the use of capital punishment may result in the execution of an innocent person. The Senate Judiciary Committee has previously found this risk to be ‘minimal,’ a view shared by numerous scholars. As Justice Powell has noted commenting on the numerous state capital cases that have come before the Supreme Court, the ‘unprecedented safeguards’ already inherent in capital sentencing statutes ‘ensure a degree of care in the imposition of the sentence of death that can only be described as unique.’”

“Our present system of capital punishment limits the ultimate penalty to certain specifically-defined crimes and even then, permit the penalty of death only when the jury finds that the aggravating circumstances in the case outweigh all mitigating circumstances. The system further provides judicial review of capital cases. Finally, before capital sentences are carried out, the governor or other executive official will review the sentence to insure that it is a just one, a determination that undoubtedly considers the evidence of the condemned defendant’s guilt. Once all of those decisionmakers have agreed that a death sentence is appropriate, innocent lives would be lost from failure to impose the sentence.”

“Capital sentences, when carried out, save innocent lives by permanently incapacitating murderers. Some persons who commit capital homicide will slay other innocent persons if given the opportunity to do so. The death penalty is the most effective means of preventing such killers from repeating their crimes. The next most serious penalty, life imprisonment without possibility of parole, prevents murderers from committing some crimes but does not prevent them from murdering in prison.”

“The mistaken release of guilty murderers should be of far greater concern than the speculative and heretofore nonexistent risk of the mistaken execution of an innocent person.”

Full text can be found here.

Arbitrariness & Discrimination

The death penalty is applied unfairly and should not be used.

In practice, the death penalty does not single out the worst offenders. Rather, it selects an arbitrary group based on such irrational factors as the quality of the defense counsel, the county in which the crime was committed, or the race of the defendant or victim.

Almost all defendants facing the death penalty cannot afford their own attorney. Hence, they are dependent on the quality of the lawyers assigned by the state, many of whom lack experience in capital cases or are so underpaid that they fail to investigate the case properly. A poorly represented defendant is much more likely to be convicted and given a death sentence.

With respect to race, studies have repeatedly shown that a death sentence is far more likely where a white person is murdered than where a Black person is murdered. The death penalty is racially divisive because it appears to count white lives as more valuable than Black lives. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 296 Black defendants have been executed for the murder of a white victim, while only 31 white defendants have been executed for the murder of a Black victim. Such racial disparities have existed over the history of the death penalty and appear to be largely intractable.

It is arbitrary when someone in one county or state receives the death penalty, but someone who commits a comparable crime in another county or state is given a life sentence. Prosecutors have enormous discretion about when to seek the death penalty and when to settle for a plea bargain. Often those who can only afford a minimal defense are selected for the death penalty. Until race and other arbitrary factors, like economics and geography, can be eliminated as a determinant of who lives and who dies, the death penalty must not be used.

Discretion has always been an essential part of our system of justice. No one expects the prosecutor to pursue every possible offense or punishment, nor do we expect the same sentence to be imposed just because two crimes appear similar. Each crime is unique, both because the circumstances of each victim are different and because each defendant is different. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that a mandatory death penalty which applied to everyone convicted of first degree murder would be unconstitutional. Hence, we must give prosecutors and juries some discretion.

In fact, more white people are executed in this country than black people. And even if blacks are disproportionately represented on death row, proportionately blacks commit more murders than whites. Moreover, the Supreme Court has rejected the use of statistical studies which claim racial bias as the sole reason for overturning a death sentence.

Even if the death penalty punishes some while sparing others, it does not follow that everyone should be spared. The guilty should still be punished appropriately, even if some do escape proper punishment unfairly. The death penalty should apply to killers of black people as well as to killers of whites. High paid, skillful lawyers should not be able to get some defendants off on technicalities. The existence of some systemic problems is no reason to abandon the whole death penalty system.

Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. President and Chief Executive Officer, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, Inc. Excerpt from “Legal Lynching: Racism, Injustice & the Death Penalty,” (Marlowe & Company, 1996)

“Who receives the death penalty has less to do with the violence of the crime than with the color of the criminal’s skin, or more often, the color of the victim’s skin. Murder — always tragic — seems to be a more heinous and despicable crime in some states than in others. Women who kill and who are killed are judged by different standards than are men who are murderers and victims.

The death penalty is essentially an arbitrary punishment. There are no objective rules or guidelines for when a prosecutor should seek the death penalty, when a jury should recommend it, and when a judge should give it. This lack of objective, measurable standards ensures that the application of the death penalty will be discriminatory against racial, gender, and ethnic groups.

The majority of Americans who support the death penalty believe, or wish to believe, that legitimate factors such as the violence and cruelty with which the crime was committed, a defendant’s culpability or history of violence, and the number of victims involved determine who is sentenced to life in prison and who receives the ultimate punishment. The numbers, however, tell a different story. They confirm the terrible truth that bias and discrimination warp our nation’s judicial system at the very time it matters most — in matters of life and death. The factors that determine who will live and who will die — race, sex, and geography — are the very same ones that blind justice was meant to ignore. This prejudicial distribution should be a moral outrage to every American.”

Justice Lewis Powell United States Supreme Court Justice excerpts from McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987) (footnotes and citations omitted)

(Mr. McCleskey, a black man, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1978 for killing a white police officer while robbing a store. Mr. McCleskey appealed his conviction and death sentence, claiming racial discrimination in the application of Georgia’s death penalty. He presented statistical analysis showing a pattern of sentencing disparities based primarily on the race of the victim. The analysis indicated that black defendants who killed white victims had the greatest likelihood of receiving the death penalty. Writing the majority opinion for the Supreme Court, Justice Powell held that statistical studies on race by themselves were an insufficient basis for overturning the death penalty.)

“[T]he claim that [t]his sentence rests on the irrelevant factor of race easily could be extended to apply to claims based on unexplained discrepancies that correlate to membership in other minority groups, and even to gender. Similarly, since [this] claim relates to the race of his victim, other claims could apply with equally logical force to statistical disparities that correlate with the race or sex of other actors in the criminal justice system, such as defense attorneys or judges. Also, there is no logical reason that such a claim need be limited to racial or sexual bias. If arbitrary and capricious punishment is the touchstone under the Eighth Amendment, such a claim could — at least in theory — be based upon any arbitrary variable, such as the defendant’s facial characteristics, or the physical attractiveness of the defendant or the victim, that some statistical study indicates may be influential in jury decision making. As these examples illustrate, there is no limiting principle to the type of challenge brought by McCleskey. The Constitution does not require that a State eliminate any demonstrable disparity that correlates with a potentially irrelevant factor in order to operate a criminal justice system that includes capital punishment. As we have stated specifically in the context of capital punishment, the Constitution does not ‘plac[e] totally unrealistic conditions on its use.’ (Gregg v. Georgia)”

The entire decision can be found here.

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A Factful Perspective on Capital Punishment

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David T Johnson, A Factful Perspective on Capital Punishment, Journal of Human Rights Practice , Volume 11, Issue 2, July 2019, Pages 334–345, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huz018

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Substantial progress has been made towards worldwide abolition of capital punishment, and there are good reasons to believe that more progress is possible. Since 2000, the pace of abolition has slowed, but by several measures the number of executions in the world has continued to decline. Several causes help explain the decline, including political leadership from the front and an increased tendency to regard capital punishment as a human rights issue rather than as a matter of domestic criminal justice policy. There are significant obstacles in the movement to eliminate state killing in the world, but some strategies could contribute to additional decline in the years to come.

People tend to notice the bad more than the good, and this ‘negativity instinct’ is apparent when it comes to capital punishment ( Rosling et al. 2018 : 48). For example, two decades ago, Leon Radzinowicz (1999 : 293), the founder of Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, declared that he ‘did not expect any substantial further decrease’ in the use of capital punishment because ‘most of the countries likely to embrace the abolitionist cause’ had already done so. In more recent years, other analysts have claimed that the human rights movement is in crisis, and that ‘nearly every country seems to be backsliding’ ( Moyn 2018 ). If this assessment is accurate, it should be cause for concern for opponents of capital punishment because a heightened regard for human rights is widely regarded as the key cause of abolition since the 1980s ( Hood and Hoyle 2009 ).

To be sure, everything is not fine with respect to capital punishment. Most notably, the pace of abolition has slowed in recent years, and executions have increased in several countries, including Iran and Taiwan (in the 2010s), Pakistan (2014–15), and Japan (2018). But too much negativity will not do. I adopt a factful perspective about the future of capital punishment: I see substantial progress toward worldwide abolition, and this gives me hope that further progress is possible ( Rosling et al. 2018 ).

This article builds on Roger Hood’s seminal study of the movement to abolish capital punishment, which found ‘a remarkable increase in the number of abolitionist countries’ in the 1980s and 1990s ( Hood 2001 : 331). It proceeds in four parts. Section 1 shows that in the two decades or so since 2000 the pace of abolition has slowed but not ceased, and the total number of executions in the world has continued to decline. Section 2 explains how death penalty declines have been achieved in recent years. Section 3 identifies obstacles in the movement toward elimination of state killing in the modern world. And Section 4 suggests some priorities and strategies that could contribute to additional decline in the death penalty in the third decade of the third millennium.

These examples exclude estimates for the People’s Republic of China, which does not disclose reliable death penalty figures, but which probably executes more people each year than the rest of the world combined.

Table 1 displays the number of countries with each of these four death penalty statuses in five years: 1988, 1995, 2000, 2007, and 2017. Overall, the percentage of countries to retain capital punishment has declined by half over that period, from 56 per cent in 1988 to 28 per cent in 2017. But Table 2 shows that the pace of abolition has slowed since the 1990s, when 37 countries abolished. By comparison, only 23 countries abolished in the 2000s, with 11 more countries abolishing in the first eight years of the 2010s. The pace of abolition has declined partly because much of the lowest hanging fruit has already been picked.

Number of abolitionist and retentionist countries, 1988–2017

Note : Figures in parentheses show the percentage of the total number of countries in the world in that year.

Sources : Hood 2001 : 334 (for 1988, 1995, and 2000); Amnesty International annual reports (for 2007 and 2017).

Number of Countries That Abolished the Death Penalty by Decade, 1980s – 2010s

Sources : Death Penalty Information Center; Amnesty International annual reports.

Table 3 uses Hood’s figures for 1980 to 1999 ( Hood 2001 : 335) and figures from Hands Off Cain and Amnesty International to report the estimated number of executions and death sentences worldwide from 1980 to 2017. Because several countries (including China, the world’s leading user of capital punishment) do not disclose reliable death penalty statistics, the figures in Table 3 cannot be considered precise measures of death sentencing and execution trends over time, but the numbers do suggest recent declines. For instance, the average number of death sentences per year in the 2010s (2,220) was less than half the annual average for the 2000s (4,576). Similarly, the average number of executions per year in the 2010s (867) was less than half the annual average for the 2000s (1,762). Moreover, while the average number of countries per year to impose a death sentence remained fairly flat in the four decades covered in Table 3 (58 countries in the 1980s, 68 in the 1990s, 56 in the 2000s, and 58 in the 2010s), the average number of countries per year which carried out an execution declined by about one-third, from averages of 37 countries in the 1980s and 35 countries in the 1990s, to 25 countries in the 2000s and 23 countries in the 2010s. In short, fewer countries are using capital punishment, and fewer people are being condemned to death and executed.

Number of death sentences and executions worldwide, 1980–2017

Notes : (a) The numbers of reported and recorded death sentences and executions are minimum figures, and the true totals are substantially higher. (b) In 2009, Amnesty International stopped publishing estimates of the minimum number of executions per year in China.

Sources : Hood 2001 : 335 (1980–1999); Hands Off Cain (2001); Amnesty International annual reports (2002–2017).

In 2001, Hood (2001 : 336) reported that 26 countries had executed at least 20 persons in the five-year period 1994–1998. Table 4 compares those figures with figures for the same 26 countries in 2013–2017, and it also presents the annual rate of execution per million population for each country (in parentheses). The main pattern is striking decline. In 2009, Amnesty International stopped publishing estimates of the minimum number of executions per year in the People’s Republic of China, so trend evidence from that source is unavailable, but other sources indicate that executions in China have declined dramatically in the past two decades, from 15,000 or more per year in the late 1990s and early 2000s ( Johnson and Zimring 2009 : 237), to approximately 2,400 in 2013 ( Grant 2014 ) and 2,000 or so in 2016. Of the other 25 countries in Hood’s list of heavy users of capital punishment in the 1990s, 11 saw executions disappear (Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Congo, Sierra Leone, Kyrgyzstan, South Korea, Libya, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe), eight had the execution rate decline by half or more (USA, Nigeria, Singapore, Belarus, Taiwan, Yemen, Jordan, Afghanistan), and two experienced more modest declines (Saudi Arabia and Egypt). Altogether, 22 of the 26 heavy users of capital punishment in the latter half of the 1990s have experienced major declines in executions. Of the remaining four countries, one (Japan) saw its execution rate remain stable until executions surged when 13 former members of Aum Shinrikyo were hanged in July 2018 (for murders and terrorist attacks committed in the mid-1990s), while three (Iran, Pakistan, and Viet Nam) experienced sizeable increases in both executions and execution rates.

Executions and execution rates by country, 1994–1998 and 2013–2017

a The figure of 429 executions for Viet Nam is for the three years from August 2013 to July 2016.

Notes: Countries reported to have executed at least 20 persons in 1994–1998, and execution figures for the same countries in 2013–2017 (with annual rates of execution per million population for both periods in parentheses).

As explained in the text, in addition to the 26 countries that appeared in Table 3 of Hood (2001 : 336), India had at least 24 judicial executions in 1994–1998, Indonesia had four, and Iraq had an unknown number. The comparable figures for these countries in 2013–2017 (with the execution rate per million population in parentheses) are India = 2 (0.0003), Indonesia = 23 (0.09), and Iraq = 469 (2.78).

Sources : Hood 2001 : 336 (1994–1998); Amnesty International (2013–2017); the Death Penalty Database of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide (for India, Indonesia, and Iraq); Johnson and Zimring 2009 : 430 (for India 1994–1998).

The execution rate increases in Table 4 are striking but exceptional. In Iran, the fourfold increase in the execution rate gives it the highest per capita execution rate in the world for 2013–2017, with 6.68 executions per million population per year. This is approximately four times higher than the estimated execution rate for China (1.5) in the same period. The increase in Viet Nam is also fourfold, from 0.38 executions per million population per year to 1.5, while the increase in Pakistan is tenfold, from 0.05 to 0.49. Nonetheless, Viet Nam’s substantially increased execution rate in the 2010s would not have ranked it among the top ten executing nations in the 1990s, while Pakistan’s increased rate in the 2010s would not have ranked it among the top 15 nations in the 1990s. Even among the heaviest users of capital punishment, times have changed.

At least two countries that did not appear on Hood’s heavy user list for the 1990s executed more than 20 people in 2013–2017. The most notable newcomer is Iraq, which executed at least 469 persons in this five-year period, with an execution rate of 2.78 per million population per year. And then there is Indonesia. In the five years from 1994 to 1998, this country (with the world’s largest Muslim population) executed a total of four people, while in 2013–2017 the number increased to 23, giving it an execution rate of 0.09 per year per million population—about the same as the (low) execution rates in Japan and Taiwan.

When Iraq and Indonesia are added to the heavy user list for 2013–2017, only five countries out of 28 have execution rates that exceed one execution per year per million population, giving them death penalty systems that can be deemed ‘operational’ in the sense that ‘judicial executions are a recurrent and important part’ of their criminal justice systems ( Johnson and Zimring 2009 : 22). By contrast, in 1994–1998, 14 of these 28 countries had death penalty systems that were ‘operational’.

India is a country with a large population that does not appear on the frequent executing list for either the 1990s or the 2010s. In 2013–2017, this country of 1.3 billion people executed only two people, giving it what is probably the lowest execution rate (0.0003) among the 56 countries that currently retain capital punishment. India has long used judicial execution infrequently, but its police and security forces continue to kill in large numbers. In the 22 years from 1996 through 2017, India’s legal system hanged only four people, giving it an annual rate of execution that is around 1/25,000th the rate of executions in China. But over the same period, India’s police and security forces have killed thousands illegally and extrajudicially, many in ‘encounters’ that officials try to justify with the lie that the bad guy fired first.

Two fundamental forces have been driving the death penalty down in recent decades ( Johnson and Zimring 2009 : 290–304). First, while prosperity is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for abolition, economic development does tend to encourage declines in judicial execution and steps toward the cessation of capital punishment. Second, the general political orientation of government often has a strong influence on death penalty policy, at both ends of the execution spectrum. High-execution rate nations tend to be authoritarian, as in China, Viet Nam, North Korea, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. Conversely, low-execution rate nations tend to be democracies with institutionalized limits on governmental power, as in most of the countries of Europe and in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Korea, and India. Of course, these are tendencies, not natural laws. Exceptions exist, including the USA at the high end of the execution spectrum, and Myanmar and Nepal at the low end.

In addition to economic development and democratization, concerns about wrongful convictions and the execution of innocents have made some governments more cautious about capital punishment. In the USA, for example, the discovery of innocence has led to historic shifts in public opinion and to sharp declines in the use of capital punishment by prosecutors and juries across the country ( Baumgartner et al. 2008 ; Garrett 2017 ). In China, too, wrongful convictions and executions help explain both declines in the use of capital punishment and legal reforms of the institution ( He 2016 ).

The question of capital punishment is fundamentally a matter of human rights, not an isolated issue of criminal justice policy.

Death penalty policy should not be governed by national priorities but by adherence to international human rights standards.

Since capital punishment is never justified, a national government may demand that other nations’ governments end executions. ( Zimring 2003 : 27)

As the third premise of this orthodoxy suggests, political pressure has contributed to the decline of capital punishment. This influence has been especially striking in Europe, where abolition of capital punishment is an explicit and absolute condition for becoming a member of the European Union. In other countries, too, from Singapore and South Korea to Rwanda and Sierra Leone, the missionary zeal of European governments committed to abolition has led to the elimination of capital punishment or to major declines in its usage.

Political leadership has also fostered the death penalty’s decline. There are few iron rules of abolition, but one seems to be that when the death penalty is eliminated, it invariably happens despite the fact of majority public support for the institution at the time of abolition. This—‘leadership from the front’—is such a common pattern, and public resistance to abolition is so stubborn, that some analysts believe ‘the straightest road to abolition involves bypassing public opinion entirely’ ( Hammel 2010 : 236). There appear to be at least two political circumstances in which the likelihood of leadership from the front rises and the use of capital punishment falls ( Zimring 2003 : 22): after the collapse of an authoritarian government, when new leaders aim to distance themselves from the repressive practices of the previous regime (as in West Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Cambodia, and Timor Leste); and after a left-liberal party gains control of government (as in Austria, Great Britain, France, South Korea, and Taiwan).

Although use of the death penalty continues to decline, there are countervailing forces that continue to present obstacles to abolition, as they have for decades. First and foremost, there is an argument about national sovereignty made by many states, that death penalty policy and practice are not human rights issues but rather matters of criminal justice policy that should be decided domestically, according to the values and traditions of each individual country. There is the role of religion—especially Islamic beliefs, where in some countries and cultures it is held that capital punishment must not be opposed because it has been divinely ordained. There are claims that capital punishment deters criminal behaviour and drug trafficking, though there is little evidence to support this view ( National Research Council 2012 ; Muramatsu et al. 2018 ). And there is the continued use of capital punishment in the USA, which helps to legitimate capital punishment in other countries ( Hood 2001 : 339–44).

The death penalty also survives in some places because it performs welcome functions for some interests. For instance, following the Arab Spring movements of 2010–2012, Egypt and other Middle Eastern governments employed capital punishment against many anti-government demonstrators and dissenters. In other retentionist countries, capital punishment has little to do with its instrumental value for government and crime control and much to do with the fact that it is ‘productive, performative, and generative—that it makes things happen—even if much of what happens is in the cultural realm of death penalty discourse rather than the biological realm of life and death’ or the penological realms of retribution and deterrence ( Garland 2010 : 285). For elected officials, the death penalty is a political token to be used in electoral contests. For prosecutors and judges, it is a practical instrument that enables them to harness the rhetorical power of death in the pursuit of professional objectives. For the mass media, it is an arena in which dramas can be narrated about the human condition. And for the onlooking public, it is a vehicle for moral outrage and an opportunity for prurient entertainment.

In addition to these long-standing obstacles to abolition, several other impediments have emerged in recent years. Most notably, as populism spreads ( Luce 2017 ) and democracy declines in many parts of the world ( Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018 ), an ‘anti-human rights agenda’ is forcing human rights proponents to rethink their assumptions and re-evaluate their strategies ( Alston 2017 ). Much of the new populist threat to democracy is linked to post-9/11 concerns about terrorism, which have been exploited to justify trade-offs between democracy and security. Of course, we are not actually living in a new age of terrorism. If anything, we have experienced a decline in terrorism from the decades in which it was less of a big deal in our collective consciousness ( Pinker 2011 : 353). But emotionally and rhetorically, terrorism is very much a big deal in the present moment, and the cockeyed ratio of fear to harm that is fostered by its mediated representations has been used to buttress support for capital punishment in many countries, including the USA (the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995), Japan (the sarin gas attacks of 1994 and 1995), China (in Xinjiang and Tibet), India (the Mumbai attacks of 1993 and 2008 and the 2001 attack on the Parliament in New Delhi), and Iraq (where executions surged after the post-9/11 invasion by the USA, and where most persons executed have been convicted of terrorism). More broadly, the present political resonance of terrorism has resulted in some abolitionist states assisting with the use of capital punishment in retentionist nations ( Malkani 2013 ).

Some analysts believe that the ‘abolition of capital punishment in all countries of the world will ensure that the killing of citizens by the state will no longer have any legitimacy and so even more marginalize and stigmatize extra-judicial executions’ ( Hood and Hoyle 2008 : 6). Others claim that the abolition of capital punishment is ‘one of the great, albeit unfinished, triumphs of the post-Second World War human rights movement’ ( Hodgkinson 2004 : 1). But states kill extrajudicially too, and sometimes the scale so far exceeds the number of judicial executions that death penalty reductions and abolitions seem like small potatoes. The most striking example is occurring under President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines: thousands of extrajudicial executions in a country that abolished capital punishment (for the second time!) in 2006.The case of the Philippines illustrates a pattern that has been seen before and will be seen again in polities with weak law, strong executives, and fearful and frustrated citizens ( Johnson and Fernquest 2018 ). State killing often survives and sometimes thrives after capital punishment is abolished (as in Mexico, Brazil, Nepal, and Cambodia, among other countries). And in countries where capital punishment has not been abolished, extrajudicial executions are frequently carried out even after the number of judicial executions has fallen to near zero (as in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Thailand).

Despite these obstacles to abolition, the decline of capital punishment seems likely to continue in the years to come. The trajectory of this institution is shaped by political and cultural processes over which human rights practices have little influence ( Garland 2010 : Chapter 5), but priorities and strategies do matter. In this section I suggest five imperatives for the future.

First, opponents of capital punishment should recognize the limited importance of public opinion and the generally disappointing results of public education campaigns. There is in fact ‘no real evidence of a public relations campaign ever having had a significant, sustained effect on mass public opinion on capital punishment’ ( Hammel 2010 : 39). Such campaigns are not useless ( Singer 2016 ), but when they make a difference they usually do so by influencing the views of elites. To put the point a little differently, cultural change can stimulate death penalty reform, but the cultural shifts that matter most are those that operate ‘on and through state actors’ ( Garland 2010 : 143). This is where abolitionists should focus their efforts at persuasion.

Second, legal challenges to capital punishment should continue, for they have been effective in Africa, the former British colonies of the Caribbean, the USA, and many other countries (see the Death Penalty Project, https://www.deathpenaltyproject.org ). Moreover, legal challenges tend to be most effective when they come not from individual attorneys but from teams of attorneys and their non-attorney allies—social workers, scholars, mitigation investigators, and the like ( Garrett 2017 : Chapters 5–6). The basic strategy of successful teams is to ‘Make the law do what it promises. Make it be perfect’ ( Von Drehle 2006 : 196). One result is the growing recognition that state killing is incompatible with legal values. Another is a shift in focus from what the death penalty does for people to what it does to them. The evidence of the death penalty’s decline summarized in the first section of this article suggests that country after country has realized that retaining capital punishment breeds disrespect for law by exposing many of its shortcomings ( Sarat 2001 ). In some contexts, this recognition is best cultivated not by invoking ‘human rights’ as a ‘rhetorical ornament’ for anti-death penalty claims ( Dudai 2017 : 18), but simply by concentrating on what domestic law promises—and what it fails to deliver.

Third, research has contributed to the decline of capital punishment, both by undermining claims about its purported deterrent effects and by documenting flaws in its administration. In these ways, a growing empirical literature highlights ‘the lack of benefits associated with capital punishment and the burgeoning list of problems with its use’ ( Donohue 2016 : 53). Unfortunately, much of the available research concentrates on capital punishment in one country—the USA—which provides ‘a rather distorted and partial view of the death penalty’ worldwide ( Hood and Hoyle 2015 : 3). Going forward, scholars should explore questions about capital punishment in the many under-researched retentionist nations of Asia and the Middle East, and they should focus their dissemination efforts on the legal teams and governmental elites that have the capacity to challenge and change death penalty policy and practice, as described above in the first and second imperatives.

Fourth, abolition alone is not enough, in two senses. For one, it is not acceptable to replace capital punishment with a sentence of life without parole which is itself a cruel punishment that represents ‘life without hope’ and disrespect for human rights and human dignity ( Hood 2001 : 346). Moreover, when life without parole sentences are established, far more offenders tend to receive them than the number of offenders actually condemned to death. Overall, the advent of life without parole sometimes results in small to modest reductions in execution, but its main effect on the criminal process is ‘penal inflation’ ( Zimring and Johnson 2012 ). For most human rights practitioners, this is hardly a desirable set of outcomes. In addition, abolition is a hollow victory when extrajudicial executions continue or increase afterwards, yet this occurs often. The nexus between judicial and extrajudicial executions is poorly understood and much in need of further study, but the available evidence from countries such as Mexico and the Philippines suggests that ending judicial executions may do little to diminish state killing. In the light of this legal realism, a single-issue stress on abolishing capital punishment because it is inconsistent with human rights might well be considered more spectacle than substance ( Nagaraj 2017 : 23).

Finally, while the present moment is in some ways an ‘extraordinarily dangerous time’ for human rights advocates ( Alston 2017 : 14), there is room for optimism that the death penalty may be nearing the ‘end of its rope’ ( Garrett 2017 ). Overall, a factful consideration of contemporary capital punishment suggests that the situation in the world today is both bad and better ( Rothman 2018 ). A factful perspective on capital punishment also makes it reasonable to be a ‘possibilist’ about the future of this form of state killing ( Rosling et al. 2018 : 69). Substantial progress has been made toward worldwide abolition, and there are good reasons to believe that more progress is possible.

Special thanks to Professor Roger Hood for his foundational studies of the death penalty worldwide.

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Garrett B. L. 2017 . End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Grant M. 2014 . China Executed 2,400 Prisoners Last Year Says Human Rights Group. Newsweek . 21 October. https://www.newsweek.com/china-executed-2400-prisoners-2013-says-human-rights-group-278733 (referenced 29 May 2019).

Hammel A. 2010 . Ending the Death Penalty: The European Experience in Global Perspective . Palgrave Macmillan .

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Hodgkinson P. 2004 . Capital Punishment: Improve It or Remove It? In Hodgkinson P. , A. Schabas W. (eds), Capital Punishment: Strategies for Abolition , pp. 1 – 35 . New York : Cambridge University Press .

Hood R. 2001 . Capital Punishment: A Global Perspective . Punishment & Society 3 ( 3 ): 331 – 54 .

Hood R. , Hoyle C. . 2008 . The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (4th ed.). New York : Oxford University Press .

Hood R. , Hoyle C. . 2009 . Abolishing the Death Penalty Worldwide: The Impact of a ‘New Dynamic’ . Crime and Justice 38 ( 1 ): 1 – 63 .

Hood R. , Hoyle C. . 2015 . The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (5th ed.). New York : Oxford University Press .

Johnson D. T. , Fernquest J. . 2018 . Governing through Killing: The War on Drugs in the Philippines . Asian Journal of Law & Society 5 ( 2 ): 359 – 90 .

Johnson D. T. , Zimring F. E. . 2009 . The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia . New York : Oxford University Press .

Levitsky S. , Ziblatt D. . 2018 . How Democracies Die . New York : Crown .

Luce E. 2017 . The Retreat of Western Liberalism . New York : Atlantic Monthly Press .

Malkani B. 2013 . The Obligation to Refrain from Assisting the Use of the Death Penalty . International & Comparative Law Quarterly 62 ( 3 ): 523 – 56 .

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Muramatsu K. , Johnson D. T. , Yano K. . 2018 . The Death Penalty and Homicide Deterrence in Japan . Punishment & Society 20 ( 4 ): 432 – 57 .

Nagaraj V. K. 2017 . Human Rights and Populism: Some More Questions in Response to Philip Alston . Journal of Human Rights Practice 9 ( 1 ): 22 – 4 .

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Fact check: is the death penalty more expensive than life in prison.

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• ABOUT FACT CHECK

April 15, 2016 By Paul Brennan

Debates over the death penalty stir up passions on all sides, often focusing on factors that are not easy to measure objectively. Concepts of justice and fairness vary from person to person, and according to a 2012 report published by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences, all existing studies of the death penalty as a deterrent to future murders are so methodologically flawed that they are unreliable. [1] But there is one factor in the debate that is more easily quantifiable.

“Death cases are more expensive than life in prison,” Dennis Davis, president of South Dakotans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, told Vermillion Plain Talk when his state’s legislature was considering a bill to abolish capital punishment earlier this year. [2] That bill was voted down, but the issue of cost remains important in the debate over the death penalty. [3]

In 2014, the Marshall Project, a nonprofit that reports on criminal justice issues, noted,

The importance of the cost issue raises the question of whether abolition advocates like Davis are correct when they claim death cases are more expensive than life in prison. The unique nature of death penalty cases suggests Davis might be correct.

Background: death is different

In Furman v. Georgia (1972) the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the way the states of Georgia and Texas applied the death penalty was so arbitrary that it violated the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the U.S. Constitution. [6] The 5-4 decision was the first time the court had broadly ruled on the constitutionality of the death penalty. Previous decisions had been limited to issues raised at trial in each particular case under consideration. [7]

The justices were so divided on the constitutional issues involved that no majority opinion was issued in Furman , but Justice Potter Stewart’s concurrence became the most frequently cited opinion.

“The penalty of death differs from all other forms of criminal punishment, not in degree, but in kind. It is unique in its total irrevocability,” Stewart began. He argued that the application of the death penalty in Georgia and Texas varied so widely that “death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.” Stewart concluded that the Constitution "cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed." [6]

The divided opinions in Furman left open the possibility that the death penalty itself, rather than the way it was applied, constituted cruel and unusual punishment. That issue was resolved four years later in the court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia . In a 7-2 ruling, the court found that with proper safeguards in place, the death penalty was constitutional. [8]

In 1977, the first post- Furman execution took place in Utah. [9]

Death-is-different jurisprudence

The Furman and Gregg decisions ushered in an era in which capital cases are treated very differently from cases that don’t involve the death penalty. Legal scholars commonly use the term "death-is-different jurisprudence" to refer to the greater care now taken to see that rights are properly accorded to a defendant. [10]

“Capital cases involve more lawyers, more witnesses, more experts, a longer jury selection process, more pre-trial motions, an entirely separate trial for sentencing, and countless other expenses,” summarizes Equal Justice USA, an organization that advocates the abolition of the death penalty. [11]

A 2013 study, published by the University of Denver Criminal Law Review , examined the costs associated with the death penalty prior to the appeals stage in Colorado. The study found that most of the costs were related to the greater length of trials involving capital punishment. Examining prosecutions for aggravated murder between 2005 and 2010, the authors found that cases in which prosecutors sought the death penalty lasted an average of 148 days from pre-trial motions to sentencing. Cases in which prosecutors sought life in prison were significantly shorter, lasting on average 24 days. [12]

Post-sentencing appeals can add decades of further expenses to the overall cost of a death penalty case. [13] There is no general study of how long the average death sentence appeal lasts or how much it costs, but the U.S. Justice Department does publish statistics on length of the interval between a defendant being sentenced to death and the sentence being carried out.

According to the most recent DOJ report, the average time between sentencing and execution is 15.5 years. [14] This is more than 5 years longer than the average time between conviction and execution in 1996, the year the Effective Death Penalty and Antiterrorism Act was signed into law. The EDPA was intended to streamline the federal appeals process in capital cases. [14] [15]

State and federal costs

Thirty-one states and the federal government currently have the death penalty, and costs vary from state to state, due to factors ranging from the rate of compensation for attorneys representing indigent defendants to costs associated with long-term incarceration. [16] [17]

The costs associated with long-term incarceration illustrate how much certain costs can vary among states.

South Dakota currently has three prisoners awaiting execution. [18] Because the state has no actual “death row,” it houses those prisoners alongside other prisoners in the state prison annex for violent offenders, so according to the state's Department of Corrections there are no additional expenses involved in housing prisoners sentenced to death. [19]

California, in contrast, has the nation’s largest number of prisoners awaiting execution and incarcerates those 748 prisoners separately from other state prison inmates. [20] A 2012 study concluded that maintaining separate facilities meant California spent an average of $85,000 each year to incarcerate a condemned prisoner. [21] The study concluded it cost the state an average of $45,000 each year to incarcerate a prisoner serving a sentence of life without parole.

The scope of studies conducted at the state-level also vary. Some examine only expenses associated with pre-appeal trial costs, and some are even narrower, focusing only on the costs associated with either defending or prosecuting capital cases. But every study of the death penalty cases since 1976 has found that seeking death results in substantially increased legal costs. [17]

No study concluding death penalty cases in the post- Furman era are cheaper than similar cases which result in life in prison has ever been published. It’s also not an argument advanced by organizations that support the use of the death penalty.

The most recent state-level study was a comprehensive look at the cost of the death penalty in Washington, published by Seattle University in 2015. [22] The study found “Combining all cost categories, the average total costs to the justice system related to pursuit of the death penalty are about 1.4 to 1.5 times more expensive than [cases in which the death penalty could have been sought, but wasn’t].” The only area in which the death penalty cases (DPS) were less expensive than similar cases in which the death penalty was not sought (DPNS) was the cost of long-term incarceration, since death row inmates on average spend fewer years in prison than those serving a life term.

At the federal level, studies have focused on the cost associated with defending cases in which the DOJ seeks the death penalty. The most recent study by DOJ examined federal death penalty cases between 1989 and 2009. It concluded that defending death penalty cases cost on average eight times as much as defending similar cases in which the death penalty was not sought. [23]

Was Dennis Davis correct when he claimed that death cases are more expensive than life in prison?

A preliminary study by South Dakotans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, examining first-degree murder cases since 1985 that have resulted in a death sentence or life in prison, found that on average, legal costs in death penalty cases exceeded those in the other cases by $353,105. [24]

The study was submitted to the State Affairs Committee of the South Dakota State Senate as part of the committee’s hearing on this year’s bill to abolish capital punishment. [3] The study was referenced by both proponents and opponents of the bill during the hearing, and its numbers were not refuted.

While the legal costs were greater, information from the South Dakota Department of Correction shows the average cost of long-term incarceration for a prisoner sentenced to death is lower than that of a prisoner serving a life sentence. Because there are no extra expenses involved in housing condemned prisoners, and those prisoners are incarcerated for less time in state prison, the average savings per prisoner is $159,523. [19]

Since the average savings in long-term incarceration is so much lower than the average additional legal costs, it appears Davis is correct about the cost of the death penalty versus life imprisonment in his home state.

Because the costs associated with capital punishment have not been studied in every state that has the death penalty, and because most of the existing studies are limited in scope, it is not possible to state definitively that the death penalty is always more expensive than life in prison in the United States. But the studies of capital punishment conducted since the Furman decision do offer support for Davis’ claim.

Launched in October 2015 and active through October 2018, Fact Check by Ballotpedia examined claims made by elected officials, political appointees, and political candidates at the federal, state, and local levels. We evaluated claims made by politicians of all backgrounds and affiliations, subjecting them to the same objective and neutral examination process. As of 2024, Ballotpedia staff periodically review these articles to revaluate and reaffirm our conclusions. Please email us with questions, comments, or concerns about these articles. To learn more about fact-checking, click here .

Sources and Notes

• ↑ National Research Council , “Deterrence and the Death Penalty,” accessed April 14, 2016
• ↑ Vermillion Plain Talk , “Rusch pushes for death penalty reform at state legislature,” February 4, 2016
• ↑ 3.0 3.1 South Dakota Legislative Research Council , “Senate Bill 94,” accessed April 14, 2016
• ↑ The Marshall Project , “The slow death of the death penalty,” December 17, 2014
• ↑ 5.0 5.1 Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
• ↑ 6.0 6.1 Supreme Court of the United States , "Furman v. Georgia," January 17, 1972
• ↑ Southern Center for Human Rights , “Capital punishment on the 25th anniversary of Furman v. Georgia,” June 26, 1997
• ↑ Supreme Court of the United States , "Gregg v. Georgia," July 2, 1976
• ↑ Utah Communication History Encyclopedia , “The 1977 execution of Gary Gilmore,” May 4, 2010
• ↑ Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law , “Death-is-different jurisprudence and the role of the capital jury,” 2004
• ↑ Equal Justice USA , “Wasteful and inefficient,” accessed April 14, 2016
• ↑ University of Denver Criminal Law Review, “The cost of Colorado’s death penalty,” 2013
• ↑ Death Penalty Information Center , “Time on death row,” accessed April 14, 2016
• ↑ 14.0 14.1 U.S. Department of Justice , “Capital punishment, 2013--statistical tables,” December 19, 2014
• ↑ PBS Frontline , “The new speed-up in habeas corpus appeals,” accessed April 14, 2016
• ↑ Death Penalty Information Center , “States with and without the death penalty,” accessed April 14, 2016
• ↑ 17.0 17.1 Death Penalty Information Center , “Costs of the death penalty,” accessed April 14, 2016
• ↑ South Dakota Department of Corrections , “Frequently Asked Questions: Capital Punishment,” accessed April 14, 2016
• ↑ 19.0 19.1 South Dakota Legislative Research Council , “Prison/Jail population cost estimate statement: Senate bill 94,” accessed April 14, 2016
• ↑ California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation , “Condemned inmate list,” April 7, 2016
• ↑ Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review , “Costs of Capital Punishment in California,” September 10, 2012
• ↑ Seattle University , “An analysis of the economic costs of seeking the death penalty in Washington state,” January 1, 2015
• ↑ Office of Defender Services of the Administrative Offices of the U.S. Courts , “Report to the Committee on Defender Services--Judicial Conference of the United States,” September 2010
• ↑ Email from Dennis Davis , "South Dakota Cost Comparison between the Death Penalty and Life in Prison handout," March 25, 2016

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• Capital Punishment: Our Duty or Our Doom?
• Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
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Capital Punishment:Our Duty or Our Doom?

But human rights advocates and civil libertarians continue to decry the immorality of state-sanctioned killing in the U.S. Is capital punishment moral?

About 2000 men, women, and teenagers currently wait on America's "death row." Their time grows shorter as federal and state courts increasingly ratify death penalty laws, allowing executions to proceed at an accelerated rate. It's unlikely that any of these executions will make the front page, having become more or less a matter of routine in the last decade. Indeed, recent public opinion polls show a wide margin of support for the death penalty. But human rights advocates and civil libertarians continue to decry the immorality of state-sanctioned killing in the U.S., the only western industrialized country that continues to use the death penalty. Is capital punishment moral?

Capital punishment is often defended on the grounds that society has a moral obligation to protect the safety and welfare of its citizens. Murderers threaten this safety and welfare. Only by putting murderers to death can society ensure that convicted killers do not kill again.

Second, those favoring capital punishment contend that society should support those practices that will bring about the greatest balance of good over evil, and capital punishment is one such practice. Capital punishment benefits society because it may deter violent crime. While it is difficult to produce direct evidence to support this claim since, by definition, those who are deterred by the death penalty do not commit murders, common sense tells us that if people know that they will die if they perform a certain act, they will be unwilling to perform that act.

If the threat of death has, in fact, stayed the hand of many a would be murderer, and we abolish the death penalty, we will sacrifice the lives of many innocent victims whose murders could have been deterred. But if, in fact, the death penalty does not deter, and we continue to impose it, we have only sacrificed the lives of convicted murderers. Surely it's better for society to take a gamble that the death penalty deters in order to protect the lives of innocent people than to take a gamble that it doesn't deter and thereby protect the lives of murderers, while risking the lives of innocents. If grave risks are to be run, it's better that they be run by the guilty, not the innocent.

Finally, defenders of capital punishment argue that justice demands that those convicted of heinous crimes of murder be sentenced to death. Justice is essentially a matter of ensuring that everyone is treated equally. It is unjust when a criminal deliberately and wrongly inflicts greater losses on others than he or she has to bear. If the losses society imposes on criminals are less than those the criminals imposed on their innocent victims, society would be favoring criminals, allowing them to get away with bearing fewer costs than their victims had to bear. Justice requires that society impose on criminals losses equal to those they imposed on innocent persons. By inflicting death on those who deliberately inflict death on others, the death penalty ensures justice for all.

This requirement that justice be served is not weakened by charges that only the black and the poor receive the death penalty. Any unfair application of the death penalty is the basis for extending its application, not abolishing it. If an employer discriminates in hiring workers, do we demand that jobs be taken from the deserving who were hired or that jobs be abolished altogether? Likewise, if our criminal justice system discriminates in applying the death penalty so that some do not get their deserved punishment, it's no reason to give Iesser punishments to murderers who deserved the death penalty and got it. Some justice, however unequal, is better than no justice, however equal. To ensure justice and equality, we must work to improve our system so that everyone who deserves the death penalty gets it.

The case against capital punishment is often made on the basis that society has a moral obligation to protect human life, not take it. The taking of human life is permissible only if it is a necessary condition to achieving the greatest balance of good over evil for everyone involved. Given the value we place on life and our obligation to minimize suffering and pain whenever possible, if a less severe alternative to the death penalty exists which would accomplish the same goal, we are duty-bound to reject the death penalty in favor of the less severe alternative.

There is no evidence to support the claim that the death penalty is a more effective deterrent of violent crime than, say, life imprisonment. In fact, statistical studies that have compared the murder rates of jurisdictions with and without the death penalty have shown that the rate of murder is not related to whether the death penalty is in force: There are as many murders committed in jurisdictions with the death penalty as in those without. Unless it can be demonstrated that the death penalty, and the death penalty alone, does in fact deter crimes of murder, we are obligated to refrain from imposing it when other alternatives exist.

Further, the death penalty is not necessary to achieve the benefit of protecting the public from murderers who may strike again. Locking murderers away for life achieves the same goal without requiring us to take yet another life. Nor is the death penalty necessary to ensure that criminals "get what they deserve." Justice does not require us to punish murder by death. It only requires that the gravest crimes receive the severest punishment that our moral principles would allow us to impose.

While it is clear that the death penalty is by no means necessary to achieve certain social benefits, it does, without a doubt, impose grave costs on society. First, the death penalty wastes lives. Many of those sentenced to death could be rehabilitated to live socially productive lives. Carrying out the death penalty destroys any good such persons might have done for society if they had been allowed to live. Furthermore, juries have been known to make mistakes, inflicting the death penalty on innocent people. Had such innocent parties been allowed to live, the wrong done to them might have been corrected and their lives not wasted.

In addition to wasting lives, the death penalty also wastes money. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it's much more costly to execute a person than to imprison them for life. The finality of punishment by death rightly requires that great procedural precautions be taken throughout all stages of death penalty cases to ensure that the chance of error is minimized. As a result, executing a single capital case costs about three times as much as it costs to keep a person in prison for their remaining life expectancy, which is about 40 years.

Finally, the death penalty harms society by cheapening the value of life. Allowing the state to inflict death on certain of its citizens legitimizes the taking of life. The death of anyone, even a convicted killer, diminishes us all. Society has a duty to end this practice which causes such harm, yet produces little in the way of benefits.

Opponents of capital punishment also argue that the death penalty should be abolished because it is unjust. Justice, they claim, requires that all persons be treated equally. And the requirement that justice bc served is all the more rigorous when life and death are at stake. Of 19,000 people who committed willful homicides in the U.S. in 1987, only 293 were sentenced to death. Who are these few being selected to die? They are nearly always poor and disproportionately black. It is not the nature of the crime that determines who goes to death row and who doesn't. People go to death row simply because they have no money to appeal their case, or they have a poor defense, or they lack the funds to being witnesses to courts, or they are members of a political or racial minority.

The death penalty is also unjust because it is sometimes inflicted on innocent people. Since 1900, 350 people have been wrongly convicted of homicide or capital rape. The death penalty makes it impossible to remedy any such mistakes. If, on the other hand, the death penalty is not in force, convicted persons later found to be innocent can be released and compensated for the time they wrongly served in prison.

The case for and the case against the death penalty appeal, in different ways, to the value we place on life and to the value we place on bringing about the greatest balance of good over evil. Each also appeals to our commitment to"justice": Is justice to be served at all costs? Or is our commitment to justice to be one tempered by our commitment to equality and our reverence for life? Indeed, is capital punishment our duty or our doom?

(Capital punishment) is . . . the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated . . can be compared . . . For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. --Albert Camus

If . . . he has committed a murder, he must die. In this case, there is no substitute that will satisfy the requirements of legal justice. There is no sameness of kind between death and remaining alive even under the most miserable conditions, and consequently there is no equality between the crime and the retribution unless the criminal is judicially condemned and put to death. --Immanuel Kant

For further reading:

Hugo Adam Bedau, Death Is Different: Studies in the Morality, Law, and Politics of Capital Punishment (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987).

Walter Berns, For Capital Punishment (New York: Basic Books, 1979.)

David Bruch, "The Death Penalty: An Exchange," The New Republic , Volume 192 (May 20, 1985), pp. 20-21.

Edward I. Koch, "Death and Justice: How Capital Punishment Affirms Life," The New Republic, Volume 192 (April 15,1985), pp. 13-15.

Ernest van den Haag and John P. Conrad , The Death Penalty: A Debate (New York: Plenum Press, 1983).

This article was originally published in Issues in Ethics - V. 1, N.3 Spring 1988

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Capital Punishment and the Death Penalty Essay

Criminal law and procedure, historical development of criminal law, difference between legal and social parameters in criminal law, elements of a crime.

In most nations, there are two or three sorts of courts that have authority over criminal cases. A single expert judge typically handles petty offenses, but two or more lay justices in England may sit in a Magistrates’ Court. In many nations, more severe cases are heard by panels of two or more judges (Lee, 2022). Such panels are frequently made up of attorneys and lay magistrates, as in Germany, where two laypeople sit alongside one to three jurists. The French cour d’assises comprises three professional judges and nine lay assessors who hear severe criminal cases. Such mixed courts of professionals and ordinary residents convene and make decisions by majority voting, with lawyers and laypeople having one vote.

The United States Constitution permits every defendant in a non-petty matter the right to be prosecuted before a jury; the defendant may forgo this privilege and have the decision decided by a professional court judge. To guarantee the court’s fairness, the defense and prosecution can dismiss or challenge members whom they prove to be prejudiced (Lee, 2022). Furthermore, the defense and, in the United States, the prosecution has the right of vexatious challenge, which allows it to confront several participants without providing a reason.

One of the most primitive texts illustrating European illegitimate law appeared after 1066, when William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, conquered England. By the eighteenth century, European law addressed criminal behavior specifically, and the idea of trying lawbreakers in a courtroom context began to transpire (Zalewski, 2019). The English administration recognized a scheme referred to as common law, which is the method through which regulations that regulate a group of people are established and updated. Corporate law relates to public and illegal cases and is grounded on the establishment, adjustment, and expansion of laws by adjudicators as they make permissible judgments. These decisions become standards, prompting the consequences of impending cases.

Misdemeanors, offences, and sedition are the three types of unlawful offenses presented before the courts. Misdemeanors are petty infringements decided by penalties or confiscation of property; some are penalized by less than a year in prison. Offences are meaningfully more heinous felonies with heavier consequences, such as incarceration in a federal or state prison for a year or more. Treason is characterized as anything that breaches the country’s allegiance. Felonious law changes and is often susceptible to modification based on the ethics and standards of the period.

Parameters are values with changing attributes, principles, or dimensions that may be defined and monitored. A parameter is usually picked from a data set because it is critical to understanding the situation. A parameter aids in comprehending a situation, whereas a parameter defines the situation’s bounds (Doorn et al., 2018). The critical concept of the Legal parameter is that behaviors are restricted by unspoken criteria of deviance that are agreeable to both the controlled and those that govern them. Impartiality, fairness, and morality are all ideals conveyed by social justice, and they all have their origins in the overarching concept of law (Doorn et al., 2018). From a social standpoint, it involves various topics such as abortion, cremation, bio-genetics, human decency, racial justice, worker’s rights, economic freedom, and environmental concerns.

All crimes in the United States may be subdivided into distinct aspects under criminal law. These components of an offense must then be established beyond possible suspicion in a court of law to convict the offender (Ormerod & Laird, 2021). Many delinquencies need the manifestation of three crucial rudiments: a criminal act, criminal intent, and the concurrence of the initial two. Depending on the offense, a fourth factor called causality may be present.

First is the criminal act (Actus Reus): actus reus, which translates as “guilty act,” refers to any criminal act of an act that occurs. To be considered an unlawful act, an act must be intentional and controlled by the defendant (Ormerod & Laird, 2021). If an accused act on nature, they may not be held responsible for their conduct. Words can be deemed illegal activities and result in accusations such as perjury, verbal harassment, conspiracy, or incitement. On the contrary, concepts are not considered illegal acts but might add to the second component: intent.

Second is crime intent (Mens Rea): for a felonious offense to be categorized as a misconduct, the culprit’s mental circumstance must be reflected. According to the code of mens rea, a suspect can only be considered remorseful if there is felonious intent (Ormerod & Laird, 2021). Third is concurrence, which refers to the coexistence of intent to commit a crime and illicit behavior. If there is proof that the mens rea preceded or happened simultaneously with the actus reus, the burden of proving it is met. Fourth is causation: this fourth ingredient of an offense is present in most criminal cases, but not all. The link concerning the defendant’s act and the final consequence is called causation. The trial must establish outside a possible suspicion that the perpetrator’s acts triggered the resultant criminality, which is usually detriment or damage.

The risk of executing an innocent man cannot be entirely removed despite precautions and protection to prevent capital punishment. If the death penalty was replaced with a statement of life imprisonment, the money saved as a result of abolishing capital punishment may be spent in community development programs. The harshness of the penalty is not as efficient as the guarantee that the penalty will be given in discouraging crime. In other terms, if the penalty dissuades crime, there is no incentive to prefer the stiffer sentence.

Doorn, N., Gardoni, P., & Murphy, C. (2018). A multidisciplinary definition and evaluation of resilience: The role of social justice in defining resilience . Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure , 4 (3), pp. 112–123. Web.

Lee, S.-O. (2022). Analysis of the major criminal procedure cases in 2021 . The Korean Association of Criminal Procedure Law , 14 (1), pp. 139–198. Web.

Ormerod, D., & Laird, K. (2021). 2. The elements of a crime: Actus reus . Smith, Hogan, and Ormerod’s Criminal Law , pp 26–87. Web.

Rancourt, M. A., Ouellet, C., & Dufresne, Y. (2020). Is the death penalty debate really dead? contrasting capital punishment support in Canada and the United States . Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy , 20 (1), 536–562. Web.

Stetler, R. (2020). The history of mitigation in death penalty cases . Social Work, Criminal Justice, and the Death Penalty , pp. 34–45. Web.

Wheeler, C. H. (2018). Rights in conflict: The clash between abolishing the death penalty and delivering justice to the victims . International Criminal Law Review , 18 (2), 354–375. Web.

Zalewski, W. (2019). Double-track system in Polish criminal law. Political and criminal assumptions, history, contemporary references . Acta Poloniae Historica , 118 , pp 39. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 17). Capital Punishment and the Death Penalty. https://ivypanda.com/essays/capital-punishment-and-the-death-penalty/

"Capital Punishment and the Death Penalty." IvyPanda , 17 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/capital-punishment-and-the-death-penalty/.

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IvyPanda . 2023. "Capital Punishment and the Death Penalty." December 17, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/capital-punishment-and-the-death-penalty/.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Capital Punishment and the Death Penalty." December 17, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/capital-punishment-and-the-death-penalty/.

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Bryce Leonard

• The Death Penalty v. Life in Prison

The Argument of the death penalty against getting sentenced to life in prison has been around for a long time. Many people think the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment, while others believe that in the right circumstances it is completely fair. The death penalty is not always 100 percent effective, but along with prison overcrowding it can make it difficult to house inmates who have committed serious crimes for the rest of their lives. The article Death penalty vs. life in prison: The Costs goes into depth about how the death penalty and life in prison are more beneficial then the other.

In almost every case life in prison is ultimately cheaper per inmate than the death penalty. However, there are a few cases where the death penalty has saved states a load of money. For example, “compared to

a life expectancy of 77 years, Coe’s execution at 19 years on death row saved the state $773,736.” Recent studies of the nation have shown the cost of the capital punishment, the death penalty, is even greater than a study done in Tennessee in 2004 indicated. Susquehanna University conducted a study in 2016 that showed on average death row inmates cost $1.12 million more than the typical inmate.

False Convictions

Not often does criminals that get sentenced to the death penalty are innocent. Even though this is hard to prove it does not happen often. Some people, however, have been sentenced to the death penalty and then eventually get exonerated later because DNA or other form of evidence comes back to prove their innocence. With using the death penalty it carries the risk of executing an innocent person. Since these false convictions are usually changed before a state goes through with the death penalty, it can completely ruin people’s lives because it can take years before the evidence ends up getting discovered.

Do People Fear the Death Penalty

It is thought that the death penalty is actually not feared at all. States have seen that once they repeal the death penalty, they see a decrease in their homicide rates throughout the state, and there are no studies or information that suggest the death penalty deters violent crime. Because we do the death penalty by lethal injection it is painless and quick. Some criminals that commit crime so severe ultimately prefer that instead of living the rest of their life in a prison. People do believe that it does deter crime even though there is nothing to support either side. Society as a whole has the most interest in preventing murder so we should use the highest punishment to deter murder and that would be the death penalty, so as a result people believe potential murderers will think twice before killing in the fear of losing their life.

This will be disagreed upon throughout society for rest of all of or lives and some. People will always think that the families of the victim should be entitled to that payback or revenge and others will have the opinion that it is cruel and unusual punishment. However, there is no doubt that the capital punishment of the death penalty is extremely more expensive for the states that go through with it and that should be a huge decider with how states move forward with it.

• ← Prison Overcrowding is a Major Problem

4 thoughts on “ The Death Penalty v. Life in Prison ”

I think this blog post is very informative about pros and cons of each option and allows the reader to fully understand before making their decision on what they think is more effective. I also learned how controversial this topic can be, and how strongly individuals feel about their own belief. I do agree that death by lethal injection is not a strong enough incentive not to commit murder. Most criminals would rather have the injection than spend life behind bars. I think this post could be beneficial to anyone who is in the criminal justice field, or just the average person who could use more knowledge about this topic.

Bryce, this is an awesome blog post. I was shocked to learn that it is more expensive to use the death penalty. I would say personally I am against the death penalty, and for less harsh penalty’s in the U.S. Although I do not personally know anyone in prison that is where I have found myself aligned when it came to morally thinking about crime punishments. I wish you the best in future crime research.

Hello, Bryce! Your blog stood out to me because this is a very controversial (yet interesting) topic! I was very shocked to see that life in prison is cheaper than the death penalty in most cases. I definitely thought the opposite was true. Thank you for enlightening me. Personally, when it comes to the death penalty it is hard for me to form an opinion. I see both arguments, but you were right. The fact life in prison is cheaper than the death penalty should definitely be a deciding factor of whether or not states should use the death penalty. I look forward to learning more about law enforcement and the criminal justice system from you!

Bryce, I enjoyed your blog on the death penalty vs. life sentencing. I do believe it can be a heated and controversial debate. I was not aware of how expensive the death penalty can be. I knew it cost money, but I wouldn’t have thought it was over $1 million. Hopefully there can be a solution or better tactics to avoid putting the wrong person to the death penalty. That seems like the largest barrier to a death penalty. Best of luck in the future on your research and blogging.

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Home / Essay Samples / Social Issues / Death Penalty / Death Penalty Vs Life Imprisonment: What Brings to Better Society

Death Penalty Vs Life Imprisonment: What Brings to Better Society

• Category: Social Issues , Crime
• Topic: Death Penalty , Prison , Punishment

Pages: 4 (1886 words)

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The History of Death Penalty and Life Imprisonment

Creating the society that respects human rights: arguments against death penalty, the comparison of death penalty vs life imprisonment .

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