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| Ben "Mouse" McShane is a junior telecommunications major and writes 'Classical Geek Theatre' for the Daily News. His views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper. |
I like to write about things that are fun to read; however, when the occasion arises for me to speak out against something of a more serious nature, I feel compelled to do so.
Last week Louis Jones Jr., a Gulf War Veteran, was executed by the United States government in Terre Haute, IN. Jones was convicted of raping and beating to death a 19 year old girl.
While the courts disagreed, many important people and medical experts in the United States believed Jones suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome from the war, and perhaps was not in full control of his own actions.
A shadow of a doubt. Disgusting. The time has come for the federal government, the state of Indiana, and all other states in this country to end the use of the death penalty.
There are a few arguments in favor of the death penalty. Some arguments deal with logistics, others deal with emotions and feelings. All the arguments are misinformed. This week I will discuss the numbers, next week I will discuss the morals.
A common misconception is that the death penalty serves as a deterrent.
The death penalty does not serve as a deterrent. Statistics provided to me by the Indiana Public Defender Council show that the average murder rate for death penalty states is 5.5 for every 100,000 citizens. The average murder-rate for non-death penalty states is 3.6. Death penalty states still maintain a higher murder-rate.
Furthermore, a 1995 national survey of police chiefs showed that 67% of the chiefs surveyed do not believe the death penalty served as a deterrent, and 82% of them said that, in their estimation, murderers do not consider the consequences of their actions before committing homicide. A New York Times study completed in 2000 suggests that there is no correlation between the death penalty and a state's murder rate, one way or another.
Another misconception about the death penalty is that executing a convicted murderer saves the taxpayer money; that life-time imprisonment is cost-prohibitive.
Fact: According to a recent study commissioned by the Indiana Criminal Law Study Commission, the average death penalty process, from prosecution to execution, costs between 30-37.5 percent more than the process to give a convict a maximum life-without-parole sentence. The trial proceedings alone cost four times as much for a death penalty convict. In 1993 Duke University professors found death penalty cases cost, on average, over a quarter-million more per case than maximum sentence cases.
The death penalty does not make fiscal sense. One reason is because of the lengthy appeals process.
Misinformed proponents of the death penalty argue that the appeals process is unnecessary. They say it gives murders an unnecessary second chance. However, since 1970, over ninety people on death row have been exonerated and pronounced innocent, including two from our own state. That is approximately 11 percent of all death row inmates since 1970. Clearly the appeals process is necessary to ensure fairness. One out of every ten death row inmates has been found innocent.
It is clear, once one looks at the facts, that the death penalty makes no logistical sense whatsoever. It does not deter crime. It does not save the taxpayer money.
Next week I will show how the death penalty does not make moral sense, and how the system that murders its murderers is dangerously imperfect, if not biased and corrupt.
Write to Mouse at bbmcshane@bsu.edu
Visit www.classicalgeektheatre.com
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