Death Penalty Paper
The death penalty debate in the U.S. is dominated by the fraudulent voice of the anti-death penalty movement. The culture of lies and deceit so dominates that movement that many of the falsehoods are now wrongly accepted as fact, by both advocates and opponents of capital punishment. The following report presents the true facts of the death penalty in America. If you are even casually aware of this public debate, you will note that every category contradicts the well-worn frauds presented by the anti-death penalty movement.
The anti-death penalty movement specializes in the abolition of truth.
1. Imposition of the death penalty is extraordinarily rare. Since 1967, there has been one execution for every 1600 murders, or 0.06%. There have been approximately 560,000 murders and 358 executions from 1967-1996 FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) & Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).
2. Approximately 5900 persons have been sentenced to death and 358 executed (from 1973-96). An average of 0.2% of those were executed every year during that time. 56 murderers were executed in 1995, a record number for the modern death penalty. This represented 1.8% of those on death row. The average time on death row for those 56 executed - 11 years, 2 months ("Capital Punishment 1995", BJS, 1996), an all time record of longevity, breaking the 1994 record of 10 years, 2 months.
3. Death penalty opponents ("opponents") state that "Those who support the death penalty see it as a solution to violent crime." Opponents, hereby, present one of many fabrications. In reality, executions are seen as the appropriate punishment for certain criminals committing specific crimes. So says the U.S. Supreme Court and so say most death penalty supporters ("advocates").
4.
Opponents equate execution and murder, believing that if two acts have the same ending or result, then those two acts are morally equivalent. This is a morally untenable position. Is the legal taking of property to satisfy a debt the same as auto theft? Both result in loss of property. Are kidnaping and legal incarceration the same? Both involve imprisonment against one's will. Is killing in self defense the same as capital murder? Both end in taking human life. Are rape and making love the same? Both may result in sexual intercourse. How absurd. Opponents’ flawed logic and moral confusion mirror their "factual" arguments - there is, often, an absence of reality. The moral confusion of some opponents is astounding. Some equate the American death penalty with the Nazi holocaust. Opponents see no moral distinction between the slaughter of 12 million totally innocent men, women and children and the just execution of society's worst human rights violators.
THE RISK OF EXECUTING THE INNOCENT
Indeed, Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Markman finds that " . . . the Bedau-Radelet study is remarkable not (as retired Supreme Court Judge Harry Blackmun seems to believe) for demonstrating that mistakes involving the death penalty are common, but rather for demonstrating how uncommon they are . . . This study - the most thorough and painstaking analysis ever on the subject - fails to prove that a single such mistake has occurred in the United States during the twentieth century." Presumably, Bedau and Radelet would have selected the most compelling 23 cases of the innocent executed to prove their proposition. "Yet, in each of these cases, where there is a record to review, there are eyewitnesses, confessions, physical evidence and circumstantial evidence in support of the defendant’s guilt. Bedau has written elsewhere that it is ‘false sentimentality to argue that the death penalty ought to be abolished because of the abstract possibility that an innocent person might be executed when the record fails to disclose that such cases exist.’ . . . (T)he Bedau and Radelet study . . . speaks eloquently about the extraordinary rarity of error in capital punishment." ("Innocents on Death Row?", National Review, September 12, 1994).
Another significant oversight by that study was not differentiating between the risk of executing innocent persons before and after Furman v Georgia (1972).
There is, in fact, no proof that an innocent has been executed since 1900. And the probability of such a tragedy occurring has been lowered significantly more since Furman. In the context that hundreds of thousands of innocents have been murdered or seriously injured, since 1900, by criminals improperly released by the U.S. criminal justice system (or not incarcerated at all!), the relevant question is: Is the risk of executing the innocent, however slight, worth the justifications for the death penalty - those being retribution, rehabilitation, incapacitation, required punishment, deterrence, escalating punishments, religious mandates, cost savings, the moral imperative, just punishment and the saving of innocent lives?
Predictably, opponents still continue to fraudulently claim, even today*, that this study has proven that 23 "innocent" people have been executed, even though Bedau and Radelet, the authors of that study, conceded - in 1988 - that neither they nor any previous researchers have proved that any of those executed was innocent: "We agree with our critics that we have not proved these executed defendants to be innocent; we never claimed that we had." (41, 1 Stanford Law Review, 11/1988).
THE COST OF LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE VS THE DEATH PENALTY
Many opponents present, as fact, that the cost of the death penalty is so expensive (at least $2 million per case?), that we must choose life without parole ("LWOP") at a cost of $1 million for 50 years. Predictably, these pronouncements may be entirely false. JFA estimates that LWOP cases will cost $1.2 million - $3.6 million more than equivalent death penalty cases.
Cost of Life Without Parole: Cases Equivalent To Death Penalty Cases
$34,200/year (1) for 50 years (2), at
a 2% (3) annual cost increase, plus
$75,000 (4) for trial & appeals =
$3.01 million
2. Same, except 3% (3) = $4.04 million
3. Same, except 4% (3) =
$5.53 million
Cost of Death Penalty Cases
$60,000/year (1) for 6 years (5), at
a 2% (3) annual cost increase, plus
$1.5 million (4) for trial & appeals =
$1.88 million
Same, except 3% (3) = $1.89 million
Same, except 4% (3) =
$1.91 million
Now that's how you do it, Jillio. YOU NEED to support your argument with statistic/document/data. I'm sorry but your logic/common sense are extremely poor weight for your support. You need data from record-keeping agencies such as FBI, Bureau of Justice, etc and then YOU NEED to come up with your convincing interpretation of the data you computed. 
My statement does not explain for ALL criminals but it is a very powerful reasoning. Obviously the most popular solution that most experts agreed is to raise minimum raise that will significantly reduce blue-collar crimes. 
