The Death Penalty

How much is a Life worth?

Imagine that you are wrongfully accused of a crime, and due some factor, you are convicted of a crime that you did not commit, and your sentencing is the death penalty. How much would you say that your life is worth, and how much would you be willing to pay in order to know that you'll have time to prove your innocence? This is the feeling that over 120 people from 1973 to the present day have felt. These people were eventually released from death row when their innocence was proven. If this many people have been proven innocent and released before their scheduled execution date arrived, how many people were truly innocent, but were killed before proof of their innocence was discovered? We will never know, but as long as we have such obvious proof of our justice system's flaws, convictions should not be a life or death matter.

One of the main reasons that many people oppose the abolishment of the death penalty is the fact that tax dollars go to provide food and other necessities for the people who are in prison. When one considers the numbers, however, this becomes a rather null issue. There are just 3,415 people currently on death row, and there are hundreds of millions of people paying taxes in the U.S. When one compares these numbers, the amount of money that we would have to pay to support these 3,415 extra people would be a very small one- especially when what is on the line is considered. Is even one innocent human life being spared worth less than a quarter? A dime? This is all assuming that abolishing the death penalty would cost more money. Monetary statistics say otherwise.

In reality, the death penalty system is more expensive in most instances. The California death penalty system costs taxpayers $114 million more than the cost of keeping convicts locked up for life, and this state's 11 executions cost the state 250 million dollars. Florida's executions cost an average of $24 million apiece. Death penalty cases in Texas cost an average of three times more than life-sentence cases. Statistics for other states are comparable when put to scale.

Some say that people who are given a life sentence have a chance of escaping and may then kill other people. This is a weak argument, however, for people on death row are not immediately trotted off and thrown into the gas chamber, electrocuted, or given lethal injection. The