Thoughts on Capital Punishment

If you wrong someone, you deserve to be wronged back. This is just the way I think; it's only fair. You hit me, I hit you. You take my bread, I take yours. You willfully kill someone, you get killed. People will argue about this on a moral level, but fact is that if the punishment imposed on an offender is not as substantial as the initial offense, we create a small 'window of forgiveness' where the offender comes out on top. However, the most forgiving and noble of us will cry "The taking of a person's life is never justified, even in reparation for the worst of offenses." I disagree. If you do something so morally reprehensible as murdering someone, then you deserve to die. I can't explain this any further without beating it to death. If you disagree on this moral ground, please try to explain to me how the killing of a murderer is anything less than just.

But that argument is based on moral/ethical grounds. Let's speak now about more practical matters, such as specific states killing convicted murderers. I believe it is indeed a state's right to decide how to deal with its criminals. I have not found a phrase in the Constitution that gives the federal government the right to decide how to treat criminals so by the 10th Amendment, it is a power reserved for the states.

That could be the end of it right there. Let each state decide to enforce the death penalty or not. Got to love that federalism. If I was home and voting in North Carolina, I think I would vote for a candidate that supported the use of the death penalty for convicted murderers. But some people have told me that it costs more for the state to kill a person than it does to keep them in prison for the rest of their life. That sounds ridiculous to me. Can't the state just shoot them? That must cost as much as a bullet. So I did a little research on how much it costs to kill someone or to keep them in prison.

It turns out, at least according to Philip Cook at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy, that most of the cost of a system with the possibility of capital punishment lies in the legal proceedings that decide the fate of the offender. He has a beautiful paper called "Potential Savings from Abolition of the Death Penalty in North Carolina" that I got all of my information from. Please refer to it if you find my explanation insufficient.

Anyways, in North Carolina much more money is spent defending the accused when the prosecutors attempt to obtain a death penalty sentence. Cook says that if the death penalty was abolished, these long and expensive trials would disappear resulting in a more fiscally responsible state. In the paper I mentioned before, he cites a very relevant statistic that he got from the NC Office of Indigent Defense Services (IDS). First, he looks at nearly all the murder cases in FY's 2005 and 2006 in NC (excluding the weakest cases resulting in dismissal or conviction of a crime less than second degree murder). He then compares the cases in which the prosecution attempted to get a death penalty versus those that did not. He found that on average, IDS pays $56,900 to help a defendant in a case that was at any point declared capital and $12,600 for a case that was never declared as capital. Isn't that nuts?!

So basically, the murderers are going to be the ones that have to defend themselves against the death penalty. They are often too poor to get their own attorney so the state provides them with one. If the prosecution decides to just push for life without parole, the state pays a small amount of money compared to when the prosecution tries to convict the offender of first degree murder and sentence him to death. The difference that lands on NC taxpayers is a whopping $44,300 per case. If we didn't have the death penalty (i.e. it wasn't an option for prosecutors to shoot for), the prosecutors could only go for life in prison which results in a much cheaper and speedier trial. Cook claims that this aspect of a more expensive legal process for capital cases alone cost NC over $9.5 million dollars during the 2 years he studied. That's a lot of money.

Cook goes on to explain several other aspects of capital cases that incur massive costs on the NC government. These include expensive appeals and re-sentencings that occur after the offender is convicted, court time spent on long trials, and government funding of offices that deal exclusively with capital punishment. He does a very thorough job and I don't have the energy to try to disprove any of his data. In the end, he estimates that it costs NC almost $11 million per year to keep the death penalty as a lawful punishment for first degree murder.

After realizing this, I would vote for a politician who campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty. I can't believe that we as North Carolinians are paying $11 million a year just to have the ability to execute someone. How many people do we execute, just so we know we're getting some bang for our buck? In the years that were analyzed by Cook, we executed 9 people. To me, it's not worth the price.

Now realize that I still encourage the death penalty for murderers on a moral level, but I realize that in practice it's not quite so easy. With all the costs of the trial and the appeals and time lost, it is simply not worth it to occasionally kill someone who was convicted of murder. In an ideal world, the murderer would be convicted (even after a somewhat more expensive and lengthy trial) and there would be no appeals because the jury just made a decision and the state would then take him outside and shoot him immediately. Simple, right? But given the massive bureaucratic system in which this process now takes place, the cost has risen to a level at which the benefits of abolishing the death penalty outweighs the moral reasoning behind it.

Sure, if you really want justice for the murderers you will still endorse the death penalty, no matter what the cost. I really want justice for the murderers too, but given the massive bill I get, I think it's easier to just put them in prison for life without the possibility of parole. It's cheaper and now all those noble and forgiving people have shut up.

If you are against the death penalty for a moral reason, please message me or comment below explaining your reasoning; I would like to be convinced. I know I skipped over many issues with capital punishment in this post so please talk about the most relevant of them. If I find some more time soon, I will most definitely address them. I'm including some information about Cook's paper at the bottom so you can read it for yourself. Please do it; it's quite interesting. In the meantime I'll be reading more papers on the topic to see if anyone poses a vastly different view. Thanks for reading.

Reference: Cook, Philip J. 2009. "Potential Savings from Abolition of the Death Penalty in North Carolina," 11 American Law and Economics Review 498-529.