Title: No Savings In Lives or Money With Death Penalty
Year: 1988
Author: Linda Emanuel and Leigh Bienen
Publisher: The New York Times
Issue: August 7, 1988
Description: The death penalty is a fraud upon the public. The taxpayers are being sold a bill of goods. Both a simple and a complex analysis of the costs and benefits of the death penalty, and of the logic behind re-enactment, indicate that the policy accomplishes nothing its proponents claim, and its cost is exorbitant.
THE recent Federal drug bill reintroducing capital punishment for certain drug-related murders in an election year is further evidence that politics never changes. You can fool some of the people, but, one hopes, not all of the time.
The death penalty is a fraud upon the public. The taxpayers are being sold a bill of goods. Both a simple and a complex analysis of the costs and benefits of the death penalty, and of the logic behind re-enactment, indicate that the policy accomplishes nothing its proponents claim, and its cost is exorbitant.
Since 1976, 38 jurisdictions have reintroduced the death penalty. There are now over 2,000 people on death row. And last spring the United States Supreme Court handed down an opinion stating that it would not invalidate state capital punishment schemes, even if those schemes were not applied in a manner that was neutral with regard to race. Capital punishment is back, and for all the wrong reasons.
The public was led to believe that the reintroduction of the death penalty would produce several desirable outcomes, soon, if not immediately. There would be less crime. The crime rate would go down because those people who commit violent and heinous crimes would know about the re-enactment of capital punishment and decide not to commit those murders.
But everything we know about murderers indicates that they don’t act after rationally weighing their actions. And everything we know about the imposition of the death penalty tells us that it is just those who are too enfeebled, or mentally deficient, or hapless to plan their actions or participate in their defense who end up being sentenced to death…
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