Issue Position: Capital Punishment
Issue Position
Death Penalty
It is time end Capital Punishment in America. It is outdated, inefficient and expensive with no deterrent effect. Although I greatly respect murder victims and their families, I see no logical justification for the death penalty. Prison is Hell on Earth and locking these individuals away for their life is a much greater punishment than freeing them through death to the next world.
There is no deterrent effect to the death penalty. The murder rate does not decrease because a State has the death penalty.
Since 1973, 140 innocent American citizens have been exonerated from death row.
Twenty-three people once on Florida's Death Row have been exonerated.
Beside the human error factor in all criminal cases and that the only way to prevent executing an innocent man is to ban the death penalty, I believe that
"two wrongs simply do not make a right."
The 2011 Gallup Poll, which annually tracks America's abstract support for the death penalty, recorded the lowest level of support, and the highest level of opposition, in almost 40 years.
Only 61% supported the death penalty, compared to 80% in 1994; 35% were opposed, compared to 16% in 1994. In a more in-depth CNN poll this year that gave respondents a choice between the death penalty and a sentence of life without parole for those who commit murder, 50% chose a life sentence, while 48% chose death. Americans favor an alternative to the death penalty.
Death sentences reached a record low, dropping below 100 for the first time in the modern era of capital punishment. Executions declined by 7% compared to 2010.
www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/2011__Year__End.pdf
"I have concluded that our system of imposing the death penalty is inherently flawed. The evidence presented to me by former prosecutors and judges with decades of experience in the criminal justice system has convinced me that it is impossible to devise a system that is consistent, that is free of discrimination on the basis of race, geography or economic circumstance, and that always gets it right."
-Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois (signing the bill abolishing the death penalty, 3/9/11)
"In Florida, a mid-year budget cut of $45 million for the Department of Corrections forced the early release of 3,000 inmates. Yet, by 1988 Florida had spent $57.2 million to accomplish the execution of 18 people. It costs six times more to execute a person in Florida than to incarcerate a prisoner for life with no parole."
http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/599#fn12
Florida would save $51 million each year by punishing all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole, according to estimates by the Palm Beach Post. Based on the 44 executions Florida has carried out since 1976, that amounts to an approximate cost of $24 million for each execution. This finding takes into account the relatively few inmates, who are actually executed, as well as the time and effort expended on capital defendants who are tried but convicted of a lesser murder charge, and those whose death sentences are overturned on appeal.
("The High Price of Killing Killers," Palm Beach Post, January 4, 2000)
The average cost of defending a trial in a federal death case is $620,932, about 8 times that of a federal murder case in which the death penalty is not sought. Defendants with less than $320,000 in terms of representation costs (the bottom 1/3 of federal capital trials) had a 44% chance of receiving a death sentence at trial. On the other hand, those defendants whose representation costs were higher than $320,000 (the remaining 2/3 of federal capital trials) had only a 19% chance of being sentenced to death. Thus, the study concluded that defendants with low representation costs were more than twice as likely to receive a death sentence.
http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty
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