The Weird and The Wacky Meet

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Death Penalty:  The Final Solution

                 On January 26, 2005, the State of Connecticut is scheduled to put Michael Ross to death by lethal injection.  Twenty years ago, Ross was convicted of raping, torturing, and murdering eight women.

                 I fully believe he deserves to die for his crimes, yet I am against the death penalty.

                 How do I reconcile these two competing beliefs?  Well, first and foremost, I have to distinguish between emotion and my conscience.  As much as I feel for the victims of violent crimes, I can’t in good conscience support a state-sponsored homicide.

                 The question isn’t whether Ross deserves to die, it’s whether society deserves to kill him.  What good will adding one more death to this series of homicides do?  Unless it’s in the immediate protection of your life or someone else’s, it’s wrong to take a human life.

                 Society has an obligation to step back and be rational.  It cannot give into emotional arguments, like revenge, because vengeance is not something society was set up to enforce.   Even if it would give the victims a sense of satisfaction to have the person who murdered their loved ones killed, we can’t make a rational policy out of their emotional state.

                 This isn’t to say that criminals shouldn’t pay for the crimes they commit, but having them pay with their lives is not reasonable because it is too final a punishment.  Someone killed cannot be brought back.  If found innocent after a conviction, an inmate can’t be compensated for their lost life.  Given the flawed nature of the justice system, we can never be absolutely sure that we are taking an innocent life.

                 The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a “non-profit organization serving the media and the public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment,” says that 116 death row inmates have been found innocent since 1973.   They spent an average of nine years in prison waiting to die before being exonerated.  But, they got to keep their lives.  Even one innocent person killed by the state is one too many.

                 People who are for the death penalty argue that it deters crime.  But statistics have proven this to be untrue.  “The murder rate in the South increased by 2.1%, while the murder rate in the Northeast decreased by almost 5%. The South accounts for 82% of all executions since 1976; the Northeast accounts for less than 1%,” according to the FBI's Preliminary Uniform Crime Report for 2002.

                 Connecticut sponsored a 2002 commission to answer eleven questions about the death penalty, including one question about cost effectiveness.  Does it cost more to prosecute a death penalty case than it does to have a person spend a lifetime in prison?  The commission did not come back with any answers, because there were no one kept track of the costs of a death penalty case.  The commission finally answered the question by recommending that the costs need be studied, with full cooperation from everyone involved.

                 Other states besides Connecticut have done the research needed in regards to cost.  According to DPIC, eight states that have calculated the costs of capital murder trials found that they can cost up to sixteen times as much as a trial plus a life sentence.  

                 Not only is the death penalty cruel, but it’s not helping solve governmental financial crises.  John M. Bailey, Connecticut’s Chief State Attorney, said, “Every dollar we spend on a capital case is a dollar we can't spend anywhere else.... We have to let the public know what it costs [to pursue a capital case.]”

                 Our justice system is not perfect, not only do we sometimes put innocent people in jail, but the race of the victim plays a part in whether a jury decides to enforce the death penalty.  According to Amnesty International, “Even though blacks and whites are murder victims in nearly equal numbers of crimes, 80% of people executed since the death penalty was reinstated have been executed for murders involving white victims.”

                 Connecticut capital murder laws are some of the strictest in the nation.  Here, the death penalty is reserved for only the most heinous of crimes.  Because of this, we’ve not had an execution here since 1960.  Is now the time to begin?  I think there are points that the state is missing.  I’ve outlined a few of them above, but the most important is that it is not right to kill, especially in retaliation.

                 Recently Robert Nave of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty came to speak at HCC.  (You can read Christina Ouellette’s article about Nave’s visit in the News Section.)    Nave, for the most part, spoke eloquently against the death penalty.  While I didn’t agree with all that he said, one quote in particular stuck in my mind, “A person is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.”

                 Society should value human beings regardless of what they’ve done.  I am not advocating forgiveness or not punishing criminals.  I am arguing that human life has value because I don’t want to live in a society that kills out of anger.

Copyright 2004

Serial Killer Michael Ross Was Executed By The State of Connecticut in May 2005

By Amanda Evans

Date: 12/16/04