News of criminals on death row tends to fascinate and frighten us. But despite the harrowing details, there is no credible evidence that the death penalty deters murder or makes our communities safer.
Twenty-three states have banned the death penalty through legislation or a court ruling. The remaining eight, including California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, still allow it but have gubernatorial moratoriums on executions.
Facts About the Death Penalty
Many Americans believe that capital punishment is the best way to deter murderers. However, it comes with a hefty price tag – the US spends millions of dollars each year to execute convicted murderers. The death penalty also has several severe constitutional problems.
Can you state what a death row overview is? For example, it is unconstitutional to use the death penalty for crimes other than murder. It is also a cruel and unusual punishment to sentence people to years of solitary confinement before they are executed (the average time on death row is two decades).
The death penalty doesn’t deter murder, as evidenced by murder rates in states that abolished it were higher than those that retained it. In addition, the death penalty has a high rate of wrongful convictions. Innocent people are wrongfully convicted of killing others all the time – for example, in cases involving mental retardation, misguided eyewitnesses, junk science, and bad or inadequate legal representation.
The United States is one of the few countries that still practices capital punishment. As a result, the country must get its facts straight before changing its criminal justice system. This is especially true since the Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty violates the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
The Death Penalty is Unconstitutional
In the United States, any conviction for a capital crime must meet constitutional standards to be legal. The Eighth Amendment forbids cruel and unusual punishment, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments promise due process of law, and the Sixth Amendment guarantees a fair trial. Appeals courts scrutinize death penalty cases to ensure these and other standards are met.
But many people on death row aren’t given a fair shake. They are often convicted based on false eyewitnesses, jailhouse snitches, junk science, and prosecutorial abuse. The poor are far more likely to be on death row than the wealthy, and they often don’t have access to competent lawyers, who might not even show up for their trials. Some defendants have even been executed after being wrongfully convicted.
Furthermore, the conditions of confinement on death row are degrading and psychologically torture-like. Inmates are isolated 23 hours a day in their cells and don’t have access to training or educational programs, recreational activities, or regular visits from family and friends. This type of confinement has been shown to provoke agitation, psychosis, and self-destructive behavior. Often, these individuals are mentally unfit to face their executions. This is unacceptable. There are politicians, prosecutors, presidents, and even church leaders who defend the death penalty on grounds of deterrence, justice, safety, and retribution, but their arguments are flawed. The evidence shows that the death penalty is unconstitutional and doesn’t deter murder.
The Death Penalty Doesn’t Lead to Less Crime
Some crimes are so heinous that they demand strict penalties, up to and including the death penalty. But the idea that executing people will deter crime is an illusion. Several studies have found that murder rates do not fall when executions increase or rise when executions decrease. Most studies claiming that executions deter crime have serious flaws: inappropriate statistical analysis methods, failure to consider other factors driving murder rates, the tyranny of outlier states and years, statistical confounding of murder rates with the effects of incarceration, and weak or nonexistent tests of deterrence.
In addition, a significant number of people on death row have been proven to be innocent. DPIC research has documented more than 550 prosecutorial misconduct reversals and exonerations—more than 5.6% of all death sentences imposed in the United States since 1972.
Many people on death row are convicted of crimes from mental illness, poverty, addiction, and other social problems. Societal efforts to address these problems and restorative justice practices that heal victims and their families would be a far more effective deterrent to violence than executing people.
The Death Penalty Is Ineffective
As a practical matter, the death penalty does not work. It does not deter murder as it is supposed to. Instead, it sends the message to potential murderers that they could be executed if they commit a heinous crime. That is a very counterproductive message to send to people considering committing crimes.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that capital punishment makes us safer. Studies show that states with the death penalty have higher murder rates than those without it.
Moreover, the system is riddled with errors that lead to unjust convictions and executions. The racial and socioeconomic biases of prosecutors, juries, judges, and defense attorneys influence who gets sentenced to die and who is subsequently executed. In addition, poverty (prevalent among people on death row) and a lack of reliable, well-resourced counsel often result in wrongful convictions and executions.
The American public has a strong majority support for the abolition of capital punishment. However, opinions on the issue vary by party and education level. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more likely to favor the death penalty, as are those with less education – two-thirds of adults with only a high school diploma or lower support it. Those with some college, an associate’s degree or higher, and a bachelor’s degree are split on the issue.