Summary Of The Death Penalty By Daniel Lachance

Where there is society there have always been criminals, ones that would cause grief among others for the benefit of themselves. Accurately accessing the integrity of a nation includes how it deals with its criminals. In American circumstances, it is to kill them. “What Will Doom the Death Penalty” which was published in 2014, is an article by the New York Times enlightening left-wing ideas on capital punishment. The author of the article is Daniel LaChance, who is currently a history professor at Emory University. LaChance clearly shows his discontent with America’s system of the death penalty, calling it “…an intolerable affront to human dignity”. Whether or not capital punishment is an “affront to human dignity”, it is certainly a sign of
In 1972, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Chase, came to the conclusion that the death sentence was unconstitutionally unfair. After the decision, it became the states responsibility to dictate their own policies on the matter. LaChance believes that the system had corrupted conservatives who “…seized the opportunity to advance a broader agenda of reclaiming a government captured by liberals.” He also argued that in recent times there have been those that were indeed wrongly accused of crimes that were sentenced to death row and found innocent years later. Everyone can agree that killing the good and innocent is wrong, but those tried in court before the innovations of our modern justice and science systems did not receive sympathy of any sort. LaChance goes in depth describing the tribulations that an innocent man would have to go through to appeal a courts sentence. He writes “There were not enough lawyers to do the work” and “…the process would take up to 25 years”. Reiterating the fact that there was a negligible amount of state-appointed lawyers that would take inmate appeals and even if they did, inmates would have to wait upwards of 7 years to receive one just to begin the appeal
The state criminal and judiciary law department of Kansas has concluded that it costs the state about 72% more in expenses for death penalty cases as compared to non-death penalty cases such as life in prison. The study examined that a death penalty case fully executed cost a median of $1.26 million; that money could be utilized elsewhere in a much more beneficial way for society. According to deathpenaltyinfo.org, a website built to spread information and awareness about the death sentence, as of April, 2015 there are about 3,002 inmates currently on death row. Multiply that by $1.26 million per person and we find that the cost of keeping all of the inmates to be killed by lethal injection costs America nearly $3.8 billion. If we take all of the inmates currently on death row and pardon them to life in prison, it would save the United States at least $2.6