Should Death Penalty Be Outlawed

Whether the death penalty should be legal in the United States or not is a major controversy. People have gone back and forth weighing the pros and cons to each side. One of the questions many people ask is, “Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?” (Drehle, 2015, pg. 6). The death penalty should be illegal because life in prison is a worse punishment and easier on families, it uses up more time and money, people are wrongfully accused sometimes, and lethal injection does not always result in an immediate death.

The death penalty should be outlawed because life in prison is worse than death. The life of a prisoner in one Supermax prison in Colorado consists of 23 hours a day in a cell with almost no communication with other prisoners or the outside world (Holloway, 2015). To reiterate this statement, David Zink, who was minutes away from execution, stated, "For those who remain on death row, understand that everyone is going to die. ... Statistically speaking, we have a much easier death than most, so I encourage you to embrace it and celebrate our true liberation before society figures it out and condemns us to life without parole and we too will die a lingering
To accentuate this statement, the death penalty is also not always a quick and easy death, sometimes it can take hours for a person to die from lethal injection. Even some pharmaceutical companies refused to sell their drugs when they were going to be used for capital punishment because of stories about executions gone wrong (Drehle, 2015). In one instance, prison officials needed almost two hours to execute Joseph Wood, another example is when it took 40 minutes of attempting to execute Clayton Lockett before he finally died of a heart attack (Drehle, 2015). Maybe a firing squad would be more efficient, however, the problem is that it sheds blood, which would be