"The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics." These are the words of Bryan Stevenson, a death row lawyer. A lottery is defined as “a process whose outcome is governed by chance.” Nobody chooses what race they are or what neighborhood they grow up in, but because of racial disparity and prejudice, African-American prisoners are often sentenced to die while their white counterparts would simply receive life sentences. In addition, putting prisoners to death is expensive and innocent citizens could be convicted for crimes they didn’t commit. The death penalty should be abolished because of the expense, possibility of wrongful conviction, and racial disparity during death penalty trials.
First, since a person’s life is essentially their greatest possession, when we slate murderers for death, the process of trial and conviction is complicated, prolonged, and expensive. This process includes more lawyers, increased security costs, and more appeals. There is also a fifteen year appeals process augmenting the already exorbitant costs. While in theory, the death penalty should be cheaper than life sentences in prison, the reality couldn’t be farther from the truth. In California, death row costs total $114 million per year. Those expenditures are beyond the costs of imprisoning for life. In contrast, if these prisoners were given lifetime incarceration in place of the death penalty, the costs would total $11.5 million. Clearly, the excessive money contributed towards sentencing convicts to death is ill-spent and could be better utilized elsewhere.
Second, in any legal case, the possibility of wrongful conviction occurs. The United States justice system is run by humans and is thus fallible. In Illinois, over the course of twenty-five years, 5.6% of the 289 death row convicts were exonerated. Nineteen innocent people had been sentenced to an untimely and state-sponsored death. Inadequate legal representation, perjured or mistaken testimony, and racial prejudice are all contributing factors that have arisen in the re-examination of these death row cases. Additionally, in 2002, a supposed murderer, Ray Krone, was exonerated from death row after the perpetrator was found through DNA testing. The margin of error will always exist, and the simple truth is that a jury could pronounce an innocent man guilty.
Third, the race of the defendant and victim play an all-too-important role in deciding the sentencing of death row cases. While we would like to think that our justice system is untainted by racial prejudice, when we look at the numbers, it is clear that not all biases are left at the threshold of the courtroom. In 2001, the University of North Carolina released a study of the homicide cases in North Carolina between 1993 and 1997. They found that if the victim was white, the odds of the perpetrator receiving a death sentence increased three and a half times. If the perpetrator was not white, his or her chances of being sentenced to death increased about two times. Additionally, people of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43% of total executions since 1976. While only one-half of murder victims are white, 80% of all cases involving capital punishment involve a white victim. These numbers suggest that if a black person kills a white person, they are inherently more deserving of dying for their crimes, which simply isn’t true. Because of the racial disparity among death penalty cases, the death penalty must be abolished to ensure fair punishments among all races.
In conclusion, the lottery of capital punishment is an unjust way to sentence criminals for their crimes. Justice should be served with dignity and fairness, but executing prisoners goes beyond serving justice. Multiple premises are true: we cannot afford the expensive process of the death penalty; an innocent person could die for a crime they did not commit; racial prejudice still rages within death penalty cases. Not even in the new millennium can we cannot guarantee that every law case is airtight, nor can we guarantee racial bias does not play a role in sentencing. The exorbitant expense, possibility of wrongful conviction, and disparity between races illuminate the only just option to sentence these criminals to their crimes: abolish the death penalty and offer life sentence without parole.