Dennis McGuire, a confessed murderer and rapist of a pregnant woman in 1989, was executed on Jan. 16, 2014. A Gallup poll taken in October 2012 said 60 percent of people would agree with the decision to execute a person convicted of murder. But would those same people still agree with the decision to execute people if they knew it would take 26 minutes?
To not underplay the formality of the situation, one can do a multitude of things in 26 minutes. According to Rachel Ray, you can make Tuscan Pesto-Dressed Penne with Crispy Kale with Garlic and Broiled Tomato Crostini while also having time to run a mile at my incredibly slow pace.
This is the result of the manufacturers of Pentobarbital and the ban on its sale for use in lethal injections. Lundbeck LLC, the manufacturers of the drug, stopped selling Pentobarbital to prisons in 2011. However, supplies of the drug have only recently begun to dry up.
Instead of using Pentobarbital, as Ohio had just recently ran out, they resorted to an untested combination of midazolam and hydromorphone to carry out the execution. This resulted in the slow and painful death of McGuire.This gives us all a chance to take a step back and look at how inhumane the practice of capital punishment truly is.
The United States is the only one of the G7 countries that include Japan, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy and Canada, who still use capital punishment. Furthermore, it is one of just 21 countries that still use this practice against 97 who don’t according to Amnesty International.
Furthermore, since 1973, more than 140 people have been exonerated while sitting on death row including an average of five per year between 2000 and 2011. While that does not sound like a lot, those are more than 50 sons or daughters, many of whom may have kids of their own, who were almost killed for crimes they did not commit.
While economics should not play into this wholly ethical decision, when you look at the numbers, it is nonsensical that the United States still uses capital punishment.
By putting someone on death row, in the state of California, it costs $90,000 extra as opposed to them being sentenced to life without parole, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. When adding up the additional costs for the more than 660 prisoners on death row in California, that adds up to an extra $59 million per year.
In Texas, the numbers are just as eye-opening as a death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million in 1992, which was about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in the highest security prison for 40 years.
But while running the risk of resuscitating a stream of numbers, which get carted out every time a death penalty case makes the national news, one needs to think about the state of our prison system and how inhumanely our prison populations are treated.
Though nary a politician will touch the issue and taxpayers don’t want to foot the bill for the transgressions of others, the American prison system is an absolute nightmare.
To start, one needs to look at the overcrowding of outdated facilities. Between 1992 and 2011, America’s prisons went from incarcerating 1.3 million prisoners to 2.2 million. While no one wants to spend any money on making his or her stay in prison more comfortable, it is creating a higher rate of recidivism rather than rehabilitation.
So as to not fully digress from the main issue, the moral of the story is that we have a broken prison system fueled by the highest incarceration rate in the world. While the United States had less than five percent of the world’s population in 2008, it boasted nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population.
In closing, at some point in the next few years, the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, will reach the sentencing stage. Though the case has been authorized to seek the death penalty, from both an economic and ethical standpoint, no matter how heinous his crimes were, he does not deserve the death penalty.
We as a society have moved past public acceptance of Hammurabi’s Code; we do not need an eye for an eye to justify execution. Tsarnaev is guilty and thus, should spend the rest of his life wasting away in a federal prison. The American government, as well as the American public, should realize that Tsarnaev would be in much worse shape living out the rest of his life in complete isolation as opposed to ending it early via capital punishment.
The death penalty seems poised to be a source of controversy for years to come. Will our prisons begin to move away from their violent nature?What is your opinion on the use of capital punishment? Are there ever offenses that are worthy of the death penalty? Is it still worth the economic and moral cost? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
