Diamondback Online - The University of Maryland's Independent Daily Student Newspaper

Issue date: 3/26/08 Section: Opinion

On Monday, Diamondback Opinion Editor Goutham Ganesan presented his belief that capital punishment is a "necessity" based on the idea that the decision to pursue it is "an expression of a society's moral strength." He stated this, with little explanation, soon after lauding one victim's family's decision to oppose the death penalty as "a testament to their courage."

Instead of dwelling on Ganesan's confused rhetoric and subjective moral arguments, here are three concrete reasons why I oppose capital punishment:

First, there is a significant and well-documented potential for error in death-penalty cases.

Second, the death penalty is incredibly expensive.

Finally, the death penalty has not been shown to be an effective deterrent.

Our judicial system, though arguably the best in the world, has a long and embarrassing history of coming up with incorrect verdicts. Since 1973, 127 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence has surfaced. The most recent example is Kennedy Brewer, who was exonerated last month in Mississippi. Some death penalty advocates attempt to spin these cases as examples of the system working as it should, but if this were the case, the 127 would not have been convicted in the first place. In addition, the site identifies eight cases, one as recent as 2004, where defendants have been executed despite strong evidence of innocence. Human institutions are fallible, and our justice system is not an exception.

It costs more to execute a person than it does to imprison him or her for life. The most extensive study ever conducted on the cost of the death penalty estimated that it costs more than $2 million more to execute a person than it does to imprison him or her for life in North Carolina. In California, the additional cost is estimated to be $250 million. Even in Texas, it costs three times as much to execute a prisoner as it does to keep him or her in a maximum-security solitary cell for 40 years. Experts ranging from Maryland judges to journalists at The Wall Street Journal have acknowledged the exorbitant cost of the death penalty.

There is much debate about whether having a death penalty lowers or raises murder rates. Though intuitively it may be tempting to think a death penalty would result in lower murder rates, the data simply do not support that conclusion. In fact, a quick look at murder rates by state shows that states without the death penalty tend to have lower murder rates than states with the death penalty. It should be noted, however, that this is evidence of a correlation, not a causation.

Our judicial system is not and cannot be good enough to ensure that innocent people will not be executed. The death penalty has not been shown to lower murder rates. Imposing the death penalty costs millions of dollars more than imprisoning a person for life without parole. This system is not fail-safe, not proven effective and not cost efficient. Ganesan's abstract notions of capital punishment as a demonstration of our society's "moral strength" do not constitute objective arguments and are not sufficient to justify our continued use of this broken system.

Brendan O'Leary is a senior mechanical engineering major and webmaster for Amnesty International at this university. He can be reached at bjoleary@umd.edu.

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