Legislating Murder

Recently, the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted with an overwhelming majority of 225 to 104 to repeal the death penalty. If the state’s senate votes to abolish it as well, then New Hampshire will be the nineteenth state to outlaw capital punishment, as Governor Maggie Hassan has vowed to sign the bill into law.According to the Pew Research Center, public support for the death penalty has decreased by 23 percent since 1996, but the majority of Americans still continues to support it. Currently, the United States is the only western country, and the only country in the Group of Eight, to enforce capital punishment. Further, the U.S., along with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, carried out the most executions in the world last year.The issue with the death penalty is that our justice system is too imperfect to determine the value of a human life. By claiming that it is justified to kill a person because he or she has killed another, we must be saying that the life of the killer is less sacred than the life of the victim; otherwise, we would be equally at fault for ending someone’s life. We are dehumanizing these criminals, just like we, as a society, have dehumanized minorities throughout our history. While the crimes committed by people sentenced to death are horrendous, we as humans can or should not judge the importance of one person’s life over another. The assertion that we have the moral authority to do so is, in my opinion, arrogant. We do not have this moral authority because anything created by man will be subject to human ego and prejudice; our legal system is no different.The death penalty has been unfairly applied to blacks and Hispanics, as well as to the poor. The bias of jurors and prosecutors inevitably finds its way into death sentence rulings, which is quite evident when we look at the percentage of death row inmates who are minorities. The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice reiterates what research across the country has shown: blacks are overwhelmingly more likely to receive the death penalty than whites—this is despite the fact that roughly half of those arrested for murder are white, which in itself screams of racial bias because blacks make up only twelve percent of the population.  On average, whites are more likely to be charged with lesser crimes, to not be charged at all or to receive plea bargains. Racial bias is an inherent part of our justice system, so should we really be fueling such a dangerous, discriminatory machine with the ability to kill people? The results of this system can be seen through facts; between 1976 and 1994, of the 277 prisoners on death row, 86 minority criminals were killed for murdering white people, while only two white criminals were executed for murdering minorities. Since 85 percent of white victims are killed by whites and 94 percent of black murderers kill blacks, how is it that over 30 percent of those who were executed happened to be blacks who killed whites? Perhaps a study at Cornell Law school can answer that question; what they found was that the more stereotypically black physical traits a defendant has, the more likely he or she will be perceived as “death-worthy.”Clearly, our justice system cannot fairly determine “death-worthiness” of a person without our inherent biases interfering. Forget that murdering one’s own citizens is immoral, think about the fact that we are choosing which lives to end based on our own misconceptions. Think about the fact that 23 people were wrongfully executed in the United States during the twentieth century. Think about the fact that 17 more people were sentenced to death wrongfully, until DNA evidence exonerated them. They spent a combined 209 years in prison, waiting to be murdered.Numerous studies have revealed that the death penalty does not serve as a deterrent for murderers. In more than a dozen states, it was found that execution itself is ten times more expensive than lifelong imprisonment. In Jasper County, Texas, property taxes were raised by 7 percent to pay for the execution of just one person.The death penalty is not just inefficient, wasteful spending. It is the product of a broken legal system desperate for retribution. If someone were to kill a bad person, that killer is still wrong, in the eyes of the law. So why is that if the government kills a bad person, it is right in the eyes of the law? I do not want the responsibility of determining the value of someone’s life. As a citizen of this country, if my government is killing people, my silence makes me a murderer, too.