(August 30, 2015 at 11:26 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(August 30, 2015 at 10:16 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote: The appellate process in America, de jure, means that the death penalty is more expensive than life in prison, given the average number of years on Death Row.
That's right. But it is not execution itself that's expensive. I can do that for the price of a kitchen knife, if necessary. And consider the implications of this: that if someone is NOT on death row, they're not going to get the same appeals, even though life in prison is arguably as bad a punishment as execution. So maybe the real issue isn't the nature of the penalty, but the horrible inefficiency of the justice system in the US.
Ah, but making the death penalty more efficient does have a price, and it's a fearsome one: trust in the justice system. After all, in order to save the money spent on appeals, you'll have to reduce them dramatically. It stands to reason at that point that more innocents will be executed. And faith in America's criminal justice system is already wavering, particularly amongst minorities (upon whom the death penalty tends to fall disproportionately anyway). The reason that it is expensive, in the end, is because if the state is going to wield such a terrible sentence, it has every obligation to ensure that it is killing the right person.
That it is unfair for lifers to not have the same appeals ignores the fact that they are alive to see that the true facts of the case can come to light. The DP convict gets those appeals precisely because of the irrevocable nature of the punishment.
