Views On The Death Penalty

Is the death penalty fair and just punishment?

There is a 61-year-old prison inmate sitting on death row in the state of Florida who was sentenced to death at the age of 27. In his 34 years of solitary confinement on death row, he has not been allowed to associate with other inmates and has not been allowed to be "productive" in any way in the prison population. The massive number of appeals in his case have cost the tax payers thousands and thousands of dollars, with more appeals to come.

In the state of Ohio, there are currently 180 prison inmates on death row, some who were given the death penalty as early as 1984.

According to national statistics in 1996, there were 3,242 prison inmates on death row and in 2006, there were 3,228 under sentence of death. These same statistics indicate that in 2006, 53 of those inmates who had received the death penalty were actually executed, compared to 42 executions that took place in 2007.



Some would argue that executing a person convicted of a capital crime would be far cheaper than life imprisonment, but that argument just may not be correct.

Historical accounts indicate that the first execution in these United States took place in the early 1600's, when a military Captain was convicted of mutiny and was put to death by a firing squad.

The U. S. Department of Justice actually began compiling death penalty and execution statistics in the early 1930's and they indicate that 3,859 prisoners were executed from 1930 to 1967. By the end of the 1960's, most states in the U. S. had established laws authorizing the use of the death penalty as punishment in certain capital crimes. These state laws were opposed by many and as a result, there seemed to be a moratorium on the actual executions.

In 1972, the U. S. Supreme Court made a landmark decision in "Furman v. Georgia" (which was actually three cases combined) by ruling the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" as prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to our Constitution. Even though this decision invalidated every state law authorizing the death penalty, the Supreme Court in a vote of 5 to 4 could not reach a rationale for its decision and did not offer a controlling opinion of the Court, so each of the nine justices wrote separately.

Justice Blackmun wrote in his dissenting opinion:

"As I have said above, were I a legislator, I would do all I could to sponsor and to vote for legislation abolishing the death penalty. And were I the chief executive of a sovereign State, I would be sorely tempted to exercise executive clemency as Governor Rockefeller of Arkansas did recently just before he departed from office. There - on the Legislative Branch of the State or Federal Government, and secondarily, on the Executive Branch - is where the authority and responsibility for this kind of action lies. The authority should not be taken over by the judiciary in the modern guise of an Eighth Amendment issue."

Justice Marshall wrote in his concurring opinon:

"This point comes when there is sufficient evidence available so that judges can determine, not whether the legislature acted wisely, but whether it had any rational basis whatsoever for acting. We have this evidence before us now. There is no rational basis for concluding that capital punishment is not excessive. It therefore violates the Eighth Amendment."

Over 600 prison inmates who had received the death penalty between 1967 and 1972 had their death sentences lifted as a result of the Supreme Court's decision.

So, who was right? Was the court's decision based on the fact that the death penalty is "cruel and unusual punishment" or did the Court simply feel that it had not been presented sufficient proof that it wasn't? Some might agree that many decisions rendered by our Supreme Court are based on what they don't see, rather than what they do.

In July 1976, our U. S. Supreme Court was of a different opinion and ruled in Greg v. Georgia that the death penalty did not automatically violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In the Court's opinion it indicated that as long as the conviction trial and the sentencing trial were two separate events, the death penalty may not be unconstitutional, but if the death penalty was mandatory then it would be. In this case it seems that the Court was not overly concerned by "cruel and unusual punishment", but about the manner in which the death penalty was actually handed down by the jury. This decision also made available automatic appellate review of both the conviction trial and the sentencing trial.

As the result of the Court's 1976 decision, states began to review their death penalty statutes to insure that they removed the problems found in "Furman" and that their laws complied with the new decision.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there have been 1,126 total executions since 1976. Evidently the first was in the state of Utah, when a man was executed by a firing squad in January 1977.

At the beginning of 2008, there were 37 states, the federal government and the military who actually recognized the death penalty as a form of punishment in capital cases. Those states who did not authorize the use of the death penalty were Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Is the death penalty fair and just punishment for any crime? Obviously, killing someone for killing someone else is final, both parties are now dead. Some would say that the person "got what they deserved", while others might say that life imprisonment would have given the person convicted of this crime a lot of time to think about it and spending each day, each month, each year just like the one before might be a greater punishment.

As far as cost to the states, keeping a person on death row for 20 or 30 years, isolated from all the other inmates, is probably more expensive than keeping that person in a general prison population for life. If we actually knew the legal costs involved in what seems to be unlimited appeals by a death row inmate we would be amazed.

It seems that if states are actually going to authorize the use of the death penalty, there should be a way to render that punishment in a more timely manner. Sentencing a person to death and then keeping that person on death row for 30 years just doesn't make sense. A 50-year-old person sentenced to death, who spends 30 years on death row, has actually served a life sentence. What was the purpose of the death penalty in the first place?

Sources: Florida Department of Corrections, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, U. S. Department of Justice-Bureau of Justice Statistics, U. S. Supreme Court-Furman v. Georgia, U. S. Supreme Court Greg v. Georgia, Death Penalty Information Center.

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As a freelance writer, I write on many other topics outside government and politics. If you need some help writing those high quality blog posts, you can get in touch over here. - Ken