The Law Blogger's Scholarship

Do you agree or disagree with the death penalty? If you agree, why? If you disagree, what do you propose we do instead?

When I think about the economic struggle that this country is in, I think about ways that we as a country could cut back on unnecessary expenses. One of those expenses is the justice system. According to the California Criminal Justice Legislative Analyst's Office, it cost an average of $47,102 annually to incarcerate an inmate in the state of California. This means that over the course of the year, the U.S. spends over a billion dollars on incarcerating criminals. This money could be spent on a myriad of other things including education, welfare, or social security. In 2010, the U.S. executed only 46 inmates. That means that only 46 people committed a crime worthy of losing their life over. There is no crime in this country that only 46 people were gutsy enough to commit. Which leads me to believe that some form of subjectivity was involved in making the decision of who would die and who would live. 

This does not seem fair at all. In fact, this seems counter-productive. If the goal is to make people more afraid of breaking the law, what's the point of having "capital punishment" if it's only used a fraction of the time? I believe that their should be a set law with certain rules that must, when broken, lead to the death penalty. The law should encompass more criminal acts than it does right now, but should also leave little room for interpretation in order to withstand loopholes. I also have a problem with the logistics of the judges who end up making the judgement calls (pun intended) that put these people to death. Some people have morality issues that make it very wrong in there eyes to inadvertently kill someone. The government should make it so that no one person needs to make the call but rather follow the new rules in place.

In some instances, but not all, I think it would be fair to say that when one person claims another life, they should lose theirs. That's how life works, you do something to someone, they have the right to do it back. The law should work the same way. You do something bad, the equivalent should be done to you. Now, this principle gets a little fuzzy when dealing with minor offenses. However, with such supreme crimes as murder, there is minuscule gray area to be interpreted by human judgement. The procedures that a court of law must go through in order to sentence someone to the death penalty are also extremely arduous. The law should make it easier to expedite the process of convicting someone who has clearly committed a capital punishment.

In conclusion, I agree with the death penalty but would also like to see it altered and tweaked to make it more usable. Using the proposed ideas above, I believe the death penalty could be a more effective way of dealing with crime in this country as well as a way to dig ourselves out of this economic hole that we have been in for quite sometime now.

 

This blog post is an official entry for the <a href="http://www.joshuapondlaw.com/scholarship">Law Blogger’s Scholarship</a>, sponsored by The Law Office of Joshua Pond, <a href="http://www.joshuapondlaw.com/">http://www.joshuapondlaw.com</a>.