What odds would you require to gamble with a human life? Our justice system has failed some of our citizens, and the penalty has been a wrongful execution. Dark and macabre questions aside, this is a sincere issue and a real problem. It has been historically documented that people have been put to death and executed in the United States, who have posthumously been exonerated of their crimes due to new evidence.
In Texas, we allow capital punishment. Tcapd.org, reports the following: "Since 1973, 158 individuals – including 13 people in Texas – have been released from death rows nationwide due to evidence of their wrongful conviction." My question is this: who have we missed? Is it moral to proceed with a system that has wrongfully killed innocent people because in general, we execute the right ones?
I argue that there is no real reason to continue executions under these conditions. It costs more to execute a prisoner than it does to imprison them for life, and there is a possibility that we condemning an innocent person. We claim to value life, and we protect it with laws, but we are willing to risk a wrongful death every time we use capital punishment. We have an imperfect system, and the statistics are such: You have an imperfect chance to be sentenced correctly in a capital offense. You have a chance of being wrongfully executed.
We do not have to gamble. We can still keep our most violent criminals away from the public. We can still provide ample punishment by taking away nearly all choices they can ever have. We can reduce them to a 10x10 cell. It costs less eliminates the risk of an innocent life being taken.
Let us please stop playing a game of dice with human lives.
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