Answering Pro Death Penalty Arguments

Like many children, I was fascinated by the kind of gruesome and unwholesome things that my mother would rather I didn't know about at all. This included dinosaurs, ghosts, murders, zombies, vampires, judicial punishment, werewolves, slavery and Big Foot.

Then I grew up and certain subjects started to be pulled out of that mass. On reflections and more data, some of those bad things probably weren't real. But the rest... oh no, they are happening in the world right now.

My own reading had set me firmly against capital punishment before I even joined Amnesty International. Once I was old enough to do that, then I had an avenue to fight against the death penalty. I most definitely took it.

For well over two decades, my 'pen-pals' have included many of the world's political and judicial leaders. They have received my letters and e-mails explaining precisely why they should not put people to death.

Some of them even responded.

I've also had many ordinary individuals challenge me with firmly pro-death penalty arguments. This is my response to them.

This pro Death Penalty argument maintains that murderers would think twice, if they risked losing their own lives too. It is based on the assumption that everyone wishes to survive; and that the threat of execution plays upon human nature to make people pause before committing a homicide.

Ergo, the presence of the Death Penalty = fewer homicides. The abolition of the Death Penalty = a boom in murders, which would threaten the very fabric of society.

It sounds so feasible that it remains the number one reason why people support capital punishment. Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up at all, once actual evidence is shone upon it.

For a start, consider that until the last century, most of the nations in the world not only had judicial executions on their statute books, but actively pursued its use. Not only did homicide continue to thrive from antiquity until the modern day, but there was no massive rise in cases, once the death penalty was abolished.

Personally, I was convinced by early readings of biographies and autobiographies about the Kray Twins. They committed every one of their gangland killings while capital punishment was active in the British statute books.

It was abolished around the time that they were arrested and went to court. This was a fact which distressed Reggie in particular. He said outright that he would have chosen hanging over life-time imprisonment any day. The former was over more quickly.

But moreover, it allowed him to go out in a blaze of glory, rather than languishing impotently into old age in a cage. Of course, before then such considerations hadn't been an issue.

He'd shot his way through 1960s London in the firm belief that he'd either never be caught or that he'd never be found guilty in a court of law. The Kray Twins were, after all, Britain's answer to the Mafia and juries could be intimidated or bought.

I'll admit that is the question which always makes me recoil deep inside. I will keep calm, because no argument is ever won by screaming with incandescent rage, but I'm sick to the stomach.

Maybe it's that I've made too much of a snap judgement, but all I hear is this: 'the value of a human life should be messaged not in justice, rights and all that twaddle, but in dollars.'

I do not share that opinion; and fortunately I also have the facts on my side. It can be cheap to kill someone, nobody is disputing that. If the individual is sentenced, then immediately taken outside and strung from the nearest tree, then it's very cheap indeed. At least in monetary cost.

The price in the loss of morality and justice was quite astronomical.

Worse case scenario would place a minor in life imprisonment, wherein he or she stays until they are in extreme old age. During this time, that individual would be sharing a cell, eating food brought and prepared in bulk. They would also be working, bringing in a wage which goes directly back into the prison system. (There's an argument that this is slavery through the back door, but few people really care about that one.)

On the other hand, the individual on Death Row is incurring many, many more costs. These include:

• Extra lawyers, judges, juries and the whole apparatus of the court-room. After all, these sentences usually go to appeal, time and time again, as a stay of execution is sought.
• Cost of hiring and attendant expenses for bringing in the right lawyers. In American law, there are strict requirements governing the experience and qualifications of lawyers in capital cases. The requisite attorney might not be locally available.
• The cost of retaining all court-room staff during lengthy appellate pauses. This usually occurs while everyone is waiting for the legally sanctioned lawyer to become free.
• Scientific and laboratory results. Those representing inmates on Death Row are far more likely to order DNA testing than, for example, blood sample tests. If the result is uncertain, then this can be repeated. Such professional input is very expensive.
• Paperwork and administrative costs. All of this evidence needs to be typed up, clarified and securely stored.
• Extra prison staff. People on Death Row are held in individual cells, with guards hand delivering everything from food to toilet paper. That requires a lot more staff than guarding people serving life imprisonment.
• Execution apparatus. Even once the inmate gets there, then the mode of killing them has to be paid for. These are huge costs, particularly now that countries like Britain have banned the export of drugs to be used in lethal injections. Those with the electric chair aren't faring much better. They have to pay a wage to electricians for a start; while everyone needs to pay doctor's fees, and coroner fees, and lawyer fees, and clerical fees (in both senses of the word), and security fees (there are going to be protesters outside) etc etc etc.

The US State of New Jersey stopped executing people in 1963, because each death sentence cost the tax-payer around $4.2 million ($6,129,405.55 in today's money). A former Californian judge Donald McCartin, who never stinted on sentencing people to death, ultimately called it, 'a waste of time and money'. He noted that it was ten times more expensive to impose the Death Penalty, than to go for life imprisonment.

In short, it costs an estimated $90,000 per inmate to house them on Death Row.

Through my early reading of serial killers and all that was dark and dangerous, I encountered the story of Timothy Evans.

It should have been a cut and dried case. He confessed to murdering his wife and baby, so a British jury found him guilty. The judge sentenced him to hang. This duly occurred on March 9th 1950.

There was only one slight technical hitch. He hadn't committed the murders. Shocked, traumatized and in grief, he'd initially admitted it, but then recanted his confession later in court.

Timothy had learning difficulties and had never learned to read and write. He was also Welsh, in an English court, though all concerned would deny that was a factor. The person he named as his chief suspect was a respected English ex-serviceman, who now worked as a War Reserve Policeman.

It took three years for John Reginald Halliday Christie to be exposed as a serial killer. While in prison for the murder of eight woman, John also blithely informed his lawyer that he'd killed Mrs Evans and her baby daughter.

Unfortunately it was all a bit late for Timothy Evans, who was already in his grave. He eventually received a full post-humus pardon. Though his greatest contribution to the issue was the fact that his much publicized case was used to turn British public opinion against capital punishment. A moratorium began on the mainland just over a decade later, with a ban in effect from 1969.

Of course, it would be nice to think that Timothy Evans represented a rare occurrence, or that it's an historical case, which couldn't happen today.

Since 1970, in the United States alone, 140 people have left Death Row. They were all completely exonerated of the charge(s) which had placed them there. Some of them had served up to thirty years for a crime which they did not commit.

But bear in mind that these show only those whom the system caught. It's believed that many more go to their deaths without the miscarriage of justice ever coming to light.

The most recent person to walk free was Gussie Vann from Tennessee. He had been on Death Row since 1994, sentenced to death for the sexually motivated murder of his own daughter in 1992.

On September 22nd 2011, he was cleared of all charges, after forensic evidence was produced which proved his innocence.

There is a literary device, often used in novels about time-travel, which is guaranteed to cause readers to recoil in horror.

The time traveler knows the exact date and time of their own, or somebody else's death, and they speak it aloud. It was used poignantly in Audrey Nittenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife and Connie Willis's All Clear. It was used ruthlessly, as revenge, in Diana Gabaldon's Voyager.

We all live in the certainty that one day we will die. The great kindness of the universe is that none of us usually know when.

But those on Death Row do. They will have heard the date, time and mode of execution read out in a court of law, with witnesses to attest to its truth. The scenes which caused such disquiet in the novels have now become reality. The same psychological effects persist, only this time it's not in an author's imagination. It is very much in the real world.

The argument is, of course, that they deserved it. They committed (presumably, unless they are actually innocent) a heinous crime. This mental torture is therefore their just desserts. Proponents of the Death Penalty play with their prey like a cat swiping at a mouse.

Endless appeals can drag this scenario out for decades. They sometimes end with the victim being cleared of all charges. As for the rest, they go to the execution chamber, at the appointed time, on the appointed date, to die in the appointed way. They've known for years that it will happen; and they've been kept in a cage until it does.

Is the Death Penalty a humane way to die? I don't think so at all. But to demonstrate this, I will individually examine the methods of execution being used in the world today. That way, you can make up your own mind.