Why I Changed My Mind on Capital Punishment

                For pretty much as long as I can remember, I have been in favor of capital punishment. If you take a life, it seems just that you should have life taken from you. There’s an equality to it that lends at least the appearance of justice. You may argue that we as humans with dignity should exemplify mercy. You may argue that, if it is immoral for one person to take another person’s life, this applies equally even to those in authority who enforce the law. All those arguments have their merit, but the thought that changed my mind actually renders them irrelevant.

                To me, the death penalty actually does seem just. The question, as I see it, is one of cost versus benefit. On the one hand, we have a situation in which capital punishment is the law. The benefit is (or at least is supposed to be) justice, pure and equal, with perhaps a little deterrence factor on the side (although this is also disputed). The cost is that some innocent people will inevitably be executed. We know this not just by sheer numbers and the human error ascribable to juries, but also because we have proved people innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt after they have already been executed.

                The other alternative is a situation in which there is no death penalty. People who would otherwise have received the death sentence spend their remaining years in prison. The cost here is that it may, arguably, be less just. There may be less deterrence to the act of murder, and all those years spent in prison by inmates who would otherwise be dead and buried is subsidized by the tax payer (For what it’s worth, the average cost of keeping an inmate in prison is estimated to be about $32,000 per year). After already taking a life, the inmates then also become a leach on society. The benefit is that those innocent people falsely convicted get a chance to live, and, perhaps more importantly, a chance to appeal and be acquitted of the crimes of which they are accused.

                Once I framed the question in this way, it became obvious to me what the answer was. Justice is noble and good, but perfect justice will always be impossible. The immense error of killing innocent human beings is appalling to me. In fact, it seems to me that the injustice of killing an innocent person far outweighs whatever justice may be lost by allowing a murderer to live. Of all the costs that we as a society are willing to pay, it seems to me that none could be more noble than the cost we can pay to allow innocent people a second chance at life.