"Death-penalty system wastes precious tax dollars," is the OpEd by Bob Basque in the Arizona Republic. He's with Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona.
The execution Wednesday of Samuel Lopez once again showed that the death penalty is a wasteful and expensive exercise. The killing of Lopez accomplished nothing more than picking at the scabs of some very old wounds, while disingenuously dispensing empty promises of "closure."
As one member of Estefana Holmes' family stated after the execution, "there are no winners" in this situation, rather only a whole host of losers.
And:
Had Lopez been sentenced to live out the rest of his life within the secure walls of an Arizona Department of Corrections prison, the family of the victim could have moved toward finality decades ago. Would it have brought back their loved one? Of course not, but the execution of Lopez did not bring back Holmes either. The family of murder victims deserve respect and justice. The death penalty heartlessly traps these survivors in decades of uncertainty, forcing them to relive the trauma for years and years.
There is a much better way. Murder cases in which the prosecution seeks life without the possibility of parole are usually over much more quickly, with trials lasting in most cases a matter of weeks. A person sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole is also entitled to only one taxpayer-funded appeal and that process is usually over relatively quickly.
The death penalty is an expensive, taxpayer-funded government program that spends hefty amounts of money on two groups, lawyers and criminals. Is this the best way to spend our limited tax dollars?
Of course not, and there is a better way if we only will have the courage to finally admit that the death penalty is a wasteful system, full of empty promises.
"Death penalty hopelessly flawed," by Rev. Stacy Rector in the Tennessean. She is executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
June 29 marked the 40th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Furman vs. Georgia, which struck down the nation’s death penalty.
In its decision, the high court expressed particular concern over the arbitrary manner in which death sentences were applied, with Justice Potter Stewart likening receiving a death sentence to being struck by lightning. Four years later, when the death penalty was reinstated, new sentencing procedures were supposed to make the system fairer and less arbitrary. But in 2012, the death penalty system is as flawed as ever.
Random factors such as the race of the victim, the quality of defense counsel, and the jurisdiction in which the crime is committed continue to have a significant influence on whether a defendant will receive the death penalty. In fact, approximately 40 percent of the inmates on Tennessee’s death row come from one county, Shelby, while half of the state’s counties have never sentenced anyone to death.
And some Tennesseans continue to adhere to the deterrence myth, though a recently released report by the National Academy of Sciences found no evidence that the death penalty has any deterrent value. The group of nationally recognized experts examined more than 30 years of research claiming the death penalty’s deterrent effect on homicide rates and found that those studies were all flawed.
And:
Across the country, states are moving away from the death penalty. In the past five years, five states have repealed this failed policy. Tennessee would do well to follow their lead, end the death penalty, and refocus the state’s resources and energy on supporting surviving families of murder victims, and preventing such violence before another life is lost to homicide.
Related posts are in the OpEd category index; earlier coverage from Arizona and Tennessee, at the links. There is also more on Furman.
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