What is the true cost of the death penalty? Illustration by Corey Bright
Erica Webb – Online Editor
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Last year, Dylann Roof walked into a church only to murder nine innocent African-Americans as they offered him sanctuary and kindness. He embodied an institutionalized evil in the United States—violent white supremacy upon which he felt the nation was losing its grip.
Now, the federal government is calling for the death penalty in his case. The first time I heard this, I couldn’t help but immediately think, “Good. He deserves it.” Anger. Frustration. From one moral standpoint, an eye for an eye punishment is the best justice possible, especially when the evidence seems so clear.
From another moral standpoint, take the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.” Mercy. Nonviolence. As I scrolled through cases on Time.com, a bright red ad from the Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights caught my attention: “No. Killing Killers Won’t Bring Back Victims.”
But it’ll sure cost less money to taxpayers to sentence them to death than life sitting in a cell, right? Well, no. But people on death row are undoubtedly guilty, right? Nope, young grasshopper.
The more I looked into it, the more I realized that we as a nation have to think more analytically on this issue than emotionally or morally—we’re losing taxpayer money to a complex, inefficient and biased system.
In 1972, according to History.com, the Supreme Court temporarily ruled the death penalty to be unconstitutional because of the “arbitrary and capricious” execution styles and racial bias against African-Americans. They proceeded to try to set better standards for jury sentences and executions.
No matter how you look at it, when it comes to death, it’s different. It’s permanent. It’s playing God. The standards for who gets to live and die in a court of law are constantly evolving, or as Republican federal judge Cormac J. Carney puts it, “unconstitutionally random.” Over 40 years have passed since the 1972 ruling, yet judges from both major political parties continually turn away from the death penalty because, according to Time, the results remain unpredictable at a high cost.
An element that has been predictable throughout history is racial bias. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), 96 percent of states in which race in relation to the death penalty has been studied show a pattern of anti-black discrimination. Black perpetrators are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites, and cases with black victims are less likely to receive it than those with white victims.
Time.com states that classism also affects who gets the death penalty because the wealthy can afford the best lawyers while the poor have to settle for less—a saying on death row goes: “Those without the capital get the punishment.”
Now let’s talk about one of the greatest fears of the legal system: executing an innocent person. The DPIC statistics show that since 1973, 156 people have been exonerated from death row. Some of them spent decades of their lives in jail.
The most conservative argument: money. According to Time.com, federal trials for capital punishment cost an average of $620,932—eight times as much as those for a life sentence. California alone could save $200 million a year by abolishing the death penalty.
Why does it take that much time to actually execute perpetrators? Why waste taxpayer dollars after a guilty verdict? Like I said, death is serious business. People are going to appeal that until they literally can’t anymore. The reason they can do that is so the system makes sure it doesn’t kill innocent people, like it almost did at least 156 times.
Also, the system is tangled and slow. For example, Time states that half of California’s 750 death row inmates haven’t even started the appeal process because they have to wait for a lawyer from the state’s underfunded defense system. Only three have been executed in 10 years.
In Roof’s case, I don’t believe there’s racial bias against him. There’s obvious evidence—he’s proud of it. But his case is seemingly much more clear cut than many other death penalty cases have been. Even then, he will still get clogged in the system while costing us more money.
Now I know there are still people reading this who are thinking, “Okay, so if something so awful happened to your loved one you wouldn’t support this?” Look, I may be a journalist, but I still have some human qualities. Of course I’d be enraged. But can I support this system as a whole? No. Maybe in a perfect world where everything is clear and just to everyone, but definitely not in this one.
