Eternal Jail.
For a few reasons.
Capital punishment is legal murder in itself. We punish the accused by putting him/her to death, usually for a crime of murder, so how can we justify the Government killing the accused when the Government themselves do the same act? It's hypocritical. The idea of an eye for an eye is something that the law disagree's with. You'd be punished if you stole from someone who stole from you (as revenge or the notion of an eye for an eye). Yet how can it be justified that the State kill a person because they've killed a person? Isn't the State just as bad as the accused? Doesn't the accused then become the victim once they're strapped in and injected with a lethal cocktail or zapped with so much electricity that they're internal organs fry? And the accused becomes an even bigger victim if they are in fact innocent and proof of that is not found prior to their execution or the court has decided to ignore pleas for a new trial to bring the new evidence to light.
Capital punishment is final and there are so many cases where the innocence of the accused is proven after he has been killed. There are also many cases where the accused can't afford the proper legal representation and as a result, they get what can only be classified as an unfair trial and are put on death row as a consequence. There have been cases whereby the accused is on death row and due to the lawyer's incompetence, actual witnesses of the crime were not called to the stand until after the trial and the Court of Appeal have rejected the appeals on the ground that the lawyer should have known or done better. So as far as they are concerned, the fact that there is proof the accused may in fact be innocent of the crime does not come into it. The case of Joseph Amrine is a perfect example of the criminal system's failure and the resulting conviction and death penalty being imposed
wrongly.
There is no proof that it acts as a deterrent, on the contrary, many are saying it does not:
Authors John Sorenson, Robert Wrinkle, Victoria Brewer, and James Marquart examined executions in Texas between 1984 and 1997. They speculated that if a deterrent effect were to exist, it would be found in Texas because of the high number of death sentences and executions within the state. Using patterns in executions across the study period and the relatively steady rate of murders in Texas, the authors found no evidence of a deterrent
effect.
The site quoted here has many research findings on the level of deterrence of the death penalty.
The academic journal Crime and Delinquency examined more than a decade of executions in George W. Bush's Texas, and found "no evidence of a deterrent effect." Other research has reached the same conclusion, most notably a 1997 study of crime in over 500 counties nationwide. Cops agree with Reno too: A 1995 poll by Hart Research Associates found that just 1 percent of police chiefs believe the death penalty significantly reduces the number of homicides. Even one of the country's most conservative, pro-death-penalty judges, Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, has acknowledged that little evidence backs up the deterrence
argument.
This site also provides a lot of articles on the death penalty and is worth a read
I'm not even going to go into the issues regarding racial bias in regards to the death penalty as I'm sure you are aware that problems do exist and if you want to know, then you can look it up yourself.
Proponents of the death penalty sing it's praises, but the pure simple fact that innocent men and women are put to death by the legal system, and their innocence comes to light after their death, shows that the system is failing. Had the accused been in jail then they could be released. It's cold comfort that the accused may have been incarcerated for many years before their innocence is proven and they may have lost the better part of their lives. However they are still alive and able to be released. What happens now is that after the person is put to death and their innocence is proven, the State apologises and that's that. Death is final, there is no coming back and there is no release. There is too much of a chance that an innocent individual will be killed and for just that alone, I'd prefer life imprisonment to the death penalty. Life imprisonment means that you're still alive and if your innocence is proven, then you can be released. You can't have that with the death penalty. There's no coming back. Taking away the innocent's freedom is a terrible and disgusting thing, but taking away their life for no reason other than it was a mistake is even more inexcusable.
While it may be quick and cheap, the costs (discussed above) far outweigh the benefit of the death penalty. That's my opinion anywho
.
