The Death Penalty
Uploaded by rdsmith93 on May 08, 2012
This topic has had a lot of controversy over the last several decades. People are very passionate, when it comes to this. They have had incidents that have happened in their lives, which have influenced their opinions. Personally, for me, I am against the death penalty. I knew the man on the motorcycle that shot the man in the back of the jeep about a year ago. The man, who did the shooting, was my sister’s best friend’s step-dad; he was a really nice man, at least from what I knew about him. We heard all about how Wisconsin should have the death penalty, and that he should receive it. It hurt to know that people wanted this man dead. I have always been against the penalty, but this made me fully support against it. My friend’s sister will be able to see her step-dad, even though he will be in prison. It is still better than not being able to see him at all. Obviously, murder is the most evil thing you can do. However, I believe that everyone makes mistakes, and murder is a dumb mistake. I am glad that Wisconsin does not have the death penalty.
One main reason that I am against the death penalty is because it is very expensive. We spend an extensive amount of money every year dealing with death penalty cases. These expenses include attorneys, court, judges, appeals, and the execution. These all are paid by American people’s taxes. It is a lot of more expensive to put the criminals to death rather than just keeping them in prison for life without parole. The additional cost of confining an inmate to death row, as compared to the maximum security prisons where those sentenced to life is $90,000 per year per inmate. So for the state of California, there are about 670 inmates. This costs $60.3 million alone. For the whole process for an execution, it will cost about two to three million dollars. For example, in Florida, fifty-seven million dollars were spent on eight executions. According to Death Penalty Information Center, North Carolina spends an average of $2.16 million more per execution than a lifetime sentence without the chance of parole. Even though the executions cost a lot of money, there are many states that still use the death penalty.
A majority of the states...