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Criminals over victims? Speed implementation

Sigman

The death penalty is, in many respects, just like any other punishment: It’s meant to punish a severe crime that was committed, and, at the same time, it’s meant to be a signal deterrence that will help prevent future crimes. Although the death penalty is legal in the United States, for all practical purposes, we don’t really have a death penalty for murder.

Think about these numbers: In 2013, there were 14,827 murders committed in the United States, but only 39 people were legally executed in 2013. If we use those numbers as a guide, there is only a 0.002 percent chance in the United States of being executed if you murder someone. So fear of execution is not much of a deterrence to severe crime, currently. If the rate of legal executions began to approach the number of murders and other heinous crimes, deterrence would undoubtedly become a factor again, and the deaths of innocent people might decline; prison overcrowding would also be addressed, to some extent.

Another factor that is often mentioned is the cost to the taxpaying citizens of keeping someone alive for life, as opposed to executing them. In actuality, by the time a criminal is finally executed in the United States, it has sometimes (not always) cost more money fighting the numerous appeals processes, paying the lawyer and court costs, and so on, than would have been spent just to house the criminal for life. The anti-death-penalty factions have essentially bogged down the implementation of death sentences to the point that we really don’t have a functioning death penalty. If we did have a reasonably rapid implementation of the death penalty, the taxpayer costs associated with the death penalty would dramatically decrease.

But what about the idea that occasionally some innocent person is wrongly put to death? Actually, the statistical incidence of wrongful deaths is quite small and vanishes in comparison to the number of innocent people killed by murders in the United States. Once again, it is an interesting phenomenon to note that the death penalty abolitionists tend to be more concerned about the rare accidentally wrong execution of a criminal than they are concerned about the enormous number of people being killed by murderers. A similar oddity is in noticing that the largely leftist people opposed to the death penalty are at the same time quite concerned that women should be allowed to terminate their fetus if they become pregnant. What happened to the concern about taking an innocent life, one wonders?

Another argument that commonly arises about the death penalty is that it is about the very questionable desire for revenge. Even just retribution for a heinous crime is called “revenge.” The problem with negative labeling as an argument is that the punishment of any crime such as shoplifting, robbery, burglary, etc., could be called revenge also, with the inference that it is just wrong to punish people for illegal deeds. Most people with a modicum of common sense understand that punishment and fear of consequences is needed in the human realm: Deterrence actually works.

A last argument against capital punishment is that it disparately affects blacks and Hispanics. Actually, pretty much across the spectrum, more blacks and Hispanics are prosecuted for many crimes, not just capital ones. Studies have shown that these two groups actually commit more crimes than their proportional representation in society. Asians commit fewer crimes proportionally than their representation. Men commit more crimes than women, proportionally, and therefore most prison populations are male. Twenty-year-olds commit more crimes than 70-year-olds, so most prison populations contain disproportionate shares of young men. Sometimes we have to accept life as it is instead of devising a theoretical approach to justice that favors the law-breakers while ignoring the plight of innocent citizens.

Mike Sigman is a long-time Colorado resident with an engineering background. Reach him at mikesigman@earthlink.net.



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