Pros And Cons Of The Death Penalty

It was said long ago that a good punishment would involve an eye for an eye. Using this logic then, it would seem that the death penalty would be a good choice of punishment for a murderer. Yet, killing a killer does not solve the crime; it just creates more. Death penalty laws were created in the eighteenth century B.C. The death penalty is a punishment where the recipient gets executed. Some methods of execution include “Lethal Injection, Electrocution, Lethal Gas, Firing Squad, and Hanging” ("Methods of Execution"). It is used to eliminate criminals who commit heinous crimes from regular society, The belief is that certain crimes are too severe to be allowed to happen and so the death penalty eliminates a further threat from that person.
Of those people there is no way to tell how many of them are actually innocent. There have been over 156 people who have been on death row, yet were actually innocent. Wilbert Lee and Freddie Pitts were sentenced to life in jail. There was evidence that surfaced showing that Lee and Pitts were both innocent. The judge did not think they were innocent and sentenced them to the death penalty. Fortunately, they were taken off death row before they were executed. Thomas Gladish, Richard Greer, Ronald Keine, and Clarence Smith are some other people who were actually innocent. “The four were convicted of murder, kidnapping, sodomy, and rape and were sentenced to death.” (“Innocence cases”). They were later proven innocent and were luckily not murdered. People make mistakes. No matter how hard they search for facts and how observant they are, even the best detectives can miss important pieces of evidence that can exonerate a person on trial. It is important to note that clearing up mistakes made during the trial can only occur if the person found guilty is actually still alive. Once a person is sentenced to Death Row and the execution is held, any mistake in the evidence can never be
Sentencing people to death takes a long time and uses a lot of money. To keep people on Death Row also costs a lot. If an inmate applies for the appeals process, it costs so much more. The “death penalty cases cost more than ordinary cases because all the lawyers, judges, and other personnel will put more hours into preparing, trying, and reviewing the issues, given that life is at stake” ("COSTS: why the"). Since this is a life or death decision, it takes lot of money to employ the right people to the case to try to be the most accurate. There is a giant discrepancy between the cost of cases with the death penalty and the cost without the death penalty. “Cases without the death penalty cost $140,000 while cases where the death penalty is sought cost $1.26 million. Maintaining each death row prisoner costs taxpayers $90,000 more per year than a prisoner in general population” (“Cost of the”). The taxpayers do not want to pay that much money for someone to die. As an inmate on Death Row awaits death, they have many new people looking over the case to see if any mistakes have been made. Often times, mistakes have been found or the Court of Appeals is ready to hear the case again. This can lead to the cost of a whole new trail. “In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Kevin Wiggins — who had been sentenced to death for raping and murdering a woman in Maryland in the late 1980s — would get a