The Legalities of Human Sacrifice
A non-economic cost-benefit analysis of the death penalty in the USA
by Richard Hustad Miller
The death penalty was re-implemented in the United States in 1976 following nearly a decade in which its implementation, but not its principle, were considered unconstitutional. While an increasing majority of the American population supports the penalty, few realize its cost. The cost of executing citizens is not just monetary, although each case carried out to its sentence costs millions of dollars in public-paid attorney fees and court costs. The majority of the cost, however, is in human life. Innocent people are victims of the death penalty!
Since 1976, 75 of the 2281 people sentenced to death have later been conclusively proven innocent and released prior to the sentence being carried out. That is approximately 3.3 % of all those sentenced to death. That means that in one of every thirty cases in which the defendant was found guilty and sentenced to death, the defendant was actually innocent of all wrongdoing. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. That figure alone is enough to conclude the price is too high. Imagine the anxiety, depression and frustration felt by these people before being cleared, not to mention the years of their life wasted in prison. But that is only the beginning of the cost!
Innocent people have certainly had the sentence carried out and been killed. They have paid the ultimate price for society, just as much as any fallen soldier or great patriot to which monuments are erected. To say that all erroneous verdicts are overturned before execution is to ignore the failure rate of the system. In the same way that the trial process has its flaws and convicts innocent people, the appellate system also has its flaws allowing innocent people to have their sentences upheld. The 3.3 % who are able to prove their innocense are the lucky ones that could uncover some sort of exculpatory evidence. Certainly there were additional innocent defendants that were not so fortunate. Even if the undetected error rate is only one percent of all death penalty cases, that is 23 innocent people executed since 1976. Innocent people have been killed by the state!
The price for maintaining the death penalty, therefore, is very high: the taking of innocent lives and the imposition of torturous mental stress and the physical stress of prison upon many more. The question then remains: what is gained from this hefty price? It is conceded that there could be certain gains which would justify the approximately ten taken lives and 35 ruined lives per decade. Many more lives than this are lost in many occupations such as the police, fire department and construction, but at least those lives were not lost in vain. They accomplished something in the process and, nonetheless, chose the occupation knowing the dangers. The outrage of the death penalty is that nothing is gained from the cost!
Statistical studies, both in the United States and other countries, continue to demonstrate that there is no connection between the imposition of the death penalty and the crime rate. In fact, the crime rate has continually proven to be related to other factors such as economic conditions, not any deliberation by the criminal as to what punishment would be received if the crime were committed. Without deterrence, the remaining reason for the penalty is revenge. The death penalty serves to quell the vengeful, eye-for-an-eye mentality of a blood-thirsty society.
The focus of criminal proceedings has recently begun to turn toward victim(s). Certainly there needs to be a support mechanism for those who must face a defendant and endure the sometimes excruciating details of a trial, but that support should not interfere with the fast-eroding, constitutional fact that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. Being treated as innocent means being treated as any other innocent member of society. Those who call for more "vicitim's rights," whatever that means, need to recognize that they are actually calling for the deterioration of the principle of innocent until proven guilty, something that they would certainly invoke if erroneously charged themselves with a crime.
The reason that so much attention has lately been paid to victims is that they normally have many more resources, are better-organized and are a vocal group. Also they have the sympathy of a society that needs continuous healing from the wounds of increasingly gruesome crimes. Innocently-accused have none of these, the least of which is credibility with the public. The result is that public opinion favors revenge and legislators listen closely to what the public wants. And so three people are killed each decade and many more subjected to tortuous treatment to quench the public's needs for revenge.
Society has not evolved as much as we like to think it has: the American system continues to practice human sacrifice. If that is what the people want, they should at least recognize the cost.
(c) 1998, Richard Hustad Miller, All Rights Reserved