Abolish The Death Penalty

‘’ I don’t believe we do. I know people think eye for eye, but if you rape, we don’t rape. And I think if someone kills, we don’t kill. We’re better than that.”

-Gavin Newson, the Governor of California

On Thursday evening, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to proceed with the execution of Brandon Bernard. At 9:07 p.m., prison officials began the process of killing him. At some point, Bernard asked if it had started yet. At 9:11 p.m., the lethal injection process began. At 9:15, his body began shaking and his mouth opened wide. And after the clock hit 9:27 p.m on the 10th of December Brendon Bernard closed his eyes. He was killed just as planned, despite a national outcry to spare his life and the last-minute bid by his lawyer for clemency which the U.S. Supreme Court rejected, making him the ninth person since July to be executed by the Trump administration. The prosecutor in his case supported a commutation of his sentence because of his “remarkable” record and his lawyers argued that the prosecution withheld evidence that diminished his role in the crime which he committed when he was 18. But the Supreme Court was unmoved. The government killed him; they did not have to kill him. As Bernard’s lawyer Robert Owen told Newsweek in a statement, Bernard’s execution was “a stain on America’s criminal justice system.”

The case of Brandon Bernard sparked a long-standing debate about the justice of the death penalty and whether it is the right way to deter crime. So what is the death penalty which senselessly took the life of Brandon Bernard? As tribal societies developed into social classes and humankind created its own self-governed republics, capital punishment became a common way to deter any type of crime, including sexual assault, murder, and various military offenses. The first established death penalty laws date as far back as around 1760 BC. in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon which included the theory of an “eye for an eye.” In the United States, capital punishment has existed since 1680 and has been a common response to a variety of crimes even though the number of punishments has reduced. In most of the states in America the decision to whether impose the death penalty or not is based on the Sixth Amendment, which requires jurors, rather than judges, to find each fact necessary to make a decision. Approximately 142 countries have abolished the death penalty however there are still 7 countries that have it: Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen. Amnesty reported that at least 26,604 people were known to be under sentence of death globally at the end of 2019 and recorded 657 executions in 20 countries in 2019 most of which took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.

Capital Punishment is an inhumane system that should be abolished. The 4 reasons that support this are that there is racial and economic discrimination in the application of it, the death penalty is an expensive system and it doesn’t deter both the crime and the criminals.

Capital punishment is a prejudiced system where the color of the criminal and the victim plays a crucial and unacceptable role in deciding who receives the death penalty. According to The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ‘’People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43 % of total executions since 1976 and 55 % of those currently awaiting execution.’’ and ACLU describes the people on the death row as ‘’Virtually all are poor…, more than 40 percent are African American, and a disproportionate number are Native American, Latino, and Asian.’’. It also states that those who kill whites are more likely to die than those who kill African-Americans or Latinos. Discrimination against the poor is also well established in this system. Like every other system in our world, wealth is a powerful factor that determines an individual’s future. The ones who can afford the best private investigators and lawyers can find a way to run away from the consequences while the ones in poverty who can’t even get an inadequate legal representation at trial or on appeal find themselves bound to the electric chair saying their last words. It turns out that the race and economic status of an individual is a decisive factor, right?

The death penalty is also a pretty expensive system that the governments pay millions. Some of the examples of the costs of the death penalty can be seen below based on Amnesty International:

• A 2003 legislative audit in Kansas found that the estimated cost of a death penalty case was 70% more than the cost of a comparable non-death penalty case. Death penalty case costs were counted through to execution (median cost $1.26 million). Non-death penalty case costs were counted through to the end of incarceration (median cost $740,000).
  (December 2003 Survey by the Kansas Legislative Post Audit)
• In Tennessee, death penalty trials cost an average of 48% more than the average cost of trials in which prosecutors seek life imprisonment.
  (2004 Report from Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury Office of Research)
• In Maryland, death penalty cases cost 3 times more than non-death penalty cases or $3 million for a single case.
  (Urban Institute, The Cost of the Death Penalty in Maryland, March 2008)
• In California the current system costs $137 million per year; it would cost $11.5 million for a system without the death penalty.
  (California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice, July 2008)

The evidence all around the world supports the fact that the death penalty doesn’t achieve one of its main purposes: deterring crime and creating a safer society. According to Amnesty International ‘’ In 2004 in the USA, the average murder rate for states that used the death penalty was 5.71 per 100,000 of the population as against 4.02 per 100,000 in states that did not use it. In 2003 in Canada, 27 years after the country abolished the death penalty the murder rate had fallen by 44 percent since 1975 when capital punishment was still enforced’’. FBI also supports this fact by indicating that the states with the death penalty have the highest murder rates. Also, we should acknowledge that Iceland -one of the countries that has the lowest crime rates- doesn’t have the death penalty. This system has been going on for decades but when we look at the evidence there is little to no change caused by the presence of the death penalty.

Human life is very valuable. A value that nobody has the ability to take it back once it is gone. Bernard closed his eyes at 9:27 p.m on the 10th of December even though he had a full future ahead of him. There are still more than 26,604 people under the sentence of death globally, most of whom’s cases have been affected by factors such as race, economic situation, etc. The death penalty is a prejudiced, outdated, inhumane practice, and it must be abolished. And we shouldn’t forget that human beings are capable of change. If the criminal justice system is to change, it should be outlined not just to kill and punish, but also to rehabilitate those who’ve committed crimes. There should always be an opportunity for redemption and grace.

PETITIONS TO SIGN TO ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-congress-abolish-the-federal-death-penalty/https://sign.moveon.org/petitions/abolish-the-death-penalty-3

Resources

https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/48000/act500062008en.pdf

https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost/

https://www.aclu.org/other/case-against-death-penalty

https://www.newsweek.com/brandon-bernard-indiana-death-penalty-abolish-sanders-aoc-1554073

https://www.thecut.com/2020/12/the-senseless-killing-of-brandon-bernard.html

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/04/death-penalty-in-2019-facts-and-figures/

https://www.crf-usa.org/images/pdf/HistoryoftheDeathPenaltyinAmerica.pdf