The United States has the unpleasant honor of being the only liberal democracy in which the death penalty is still carried out. This barbaric form of punishment has been abolished by most nations that America is proud to call her peer. The arguments in favor of abolishing this ancient practice are overwhelming. There are moral, legal, financial, and societal factors to take in to consideration. Capital punishment must be abolished in order to create a criminal justice system that promotes rehabilitation and reduction of recidivism, rather than revenge and blood-lust.
Aside from the moral arguments in favor of abolishing the death penalty, there are many legal and practical considerations to take into account when discussing abolition. To start, the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the use of cruel and unusual punishment. In a world where most liberal democracies have abolished the death penalty, it is certainly an unusual punishment for America to continue to carry out. And I would be interested in an argument that pumping poison into or sending electrical charges through someone's body with the intent of killing them is not cruel. Another factor to consider is the fallibility of the American judicial system. There have been numerous cases of Americans being sentenced to death and put in prison for crimes which they did not commit, only to later be exonerated, oftentimes based upon DNA evidence. According to the abolition group Witness to Innocence, innocent Americans have spent a combined total of 1151 years on death row. Most cases rely on eye-witness testimony and scientific evidence that is nowhere near as reliable as DNA. According to the Innocence Project, eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. Texas is currently investigating the possibility that it executed an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham, in 2004. The fact of the matter is that the number of cases in which guilt can be proven with 100 percent accuracy are incredibly few.
There are practical considerations as well. It costs far more money for taxpayers to put someone to death than to incarcerate them for the rest of their life. According to a recent New Yorker article, "it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas - about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years."
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