Cover Letter
I chose to revise project one because it was the project that I had the most fun researching. I found the topic intriguing which made it a lot more fun to write. Using the feedback you gave my on my paper I was able to identify a few major things in my paper that needed some serious revision. The biggest issue was not stating the significance of each of the points I was trying to make. Asking the question “so what” really helps a lot! I read each paragraph like I could not care less about the topic and I rewrote it trying to convince myself that what I was typing mattered. Once I got into that mindset it made the significance revision a lot easier to do. The other really big revision that I made to my paper was fixing vague comments that I would make and narrowing them down to specifics. Things like making changes such as converting “we” and “them” to “United States citizens” and “government officials”. I had no idea how hard it made my writing to follow when I didn’t explain exactly whom I was talking about at every second. Even if while writing it I sounded obnoxiously thorough, when I went back and read it the paper sounded so much more informative and professional.
All the side notes you made and comments you wrote helped a tremendous amount. Before I even started to revise this paper I sat down a read it from start to finish like it was the first time I had ever read it. When I finished it was so much easier to see all the things that needed to be changed. It was almost like I could hear you in my head saying things like, “why is this significant?”, “why should I care?”, or “why is this relevant?”. It made the revision process somewhat of a breeze and it really helped me feel confident in the changes I was making. This semester has helped me become a better writer as well as helped me with revision.
Allison Smith
Professor Tetterton
Engl. 1100-110
Final Project
6 December 2012
Stand By an Eye for an Eye or Pay an Arm and a Leg
There are seven hundred and twenty four Californian inmates on death row as of April 2012 (DPIC). Taxpayers in California are currently paying to supply prisons with the funds to put all of these men and women to death. These funds equal approximately one hundred and thirty seven million dollars every year (DPIC). Some raise the argument, “Is paying all the money really worth it? Can’t they just stay in prison for life?” But recent statistics show that in California it take about eleven and one-half of a million dollars per inmates to be housed in prison for life (DPIC). If there are seven hundred and twenty four inmates currently on death row in California, which there are, then taxpayers really contributing to an approximately eight and one-half of a billion dollars fund for life imprisonment. Thus raises the real question: is the cost of life imprisonment versus the cost of lethal injection for death row inmates worth keeping these men and women alive? Furthermore, what would we have to do in order to accommodate housing an extra amount of prisoners that in other circumstances would already have been out to death? Life in prison is a less efficient, less productive, and less logical way of dealing with our nations criminals as opposed to simply using the death penalty to enforce justice in our system.
“There also appears to be no questions that, over time, equivalents LWOP cases are much more expensive… than death penalty cases” (Sharp). LWOP stands for “life without parole”. The upfront cost of lethal injection may be ore expensive compared to the eleven and a half of a million dollars to house inmates for life but one factor we have to consider is the age of the inmates we are housing (Sharp). Having a sixty year old man put on death row is a lot different that adding a twenty year old. The twenty year old will typically, if healthy, live longer than the sixty year old thus costing taxpayers even more money. The average age of the death row inmates in California as of April 2012 is forty-nine years old, but these people have been on death row for an average of seventeen years (CDRC)! Why would taxpayers want to waste any more of their money housing these inmates? Inmates will almost never be immediately put to death once convicted and charged with the death penalty and it is normally because of continued trials, trial objections, or a waiting period. All of which factor in to how long the inmate gets to live before being put to death. But taking the information that was given earlier in regards to the average time inmates spend on death row, if we are already looking and paying to keep them alive for seventeen years what makes sense about us paying to house them for even longer. So since we can’t control the age that these criminals will enter death row, we should at least control the amount of time they spend on it. The waiting period between conviction and death is unnecessarily long and a solution is to put new laws into action cutting down the criminals time spent in prison so taxpayers can stop wasting money on keeping them alive.
Take into account the seven hundred and twenty four Californian inmates. Now, think about if that is just for the state of California, how many more death row inmates are there in this country? The answer is three thousand one hundred and seventy six inmates including six that are inmates of the US Military (Ex). So taking into account, now all of these inmates, where do they all stay? The average prison in the United States can house up to four thousand three hundred inmates based on the nations fifty largest prisons (Ex). To simply house the current death row inmates our government would have to construct an entirely new prison. We would obviously need this new facility to be maximum-security prison. The average cost to expand on a prison and to make this addition maximum-security is approximately seventy two million dollars (Ex). This price is just to add on five hundred beds and have that section of the prison be maximum-security. Seventy two million dollars is a lot of money to ask our taxpayers to contribute to, especially when that is only a third of the space that we need. To build a prison that would house all three thousand one hundred and seventy six death row prisoners and be maximum-security would cost the government approximately two hundred and ninety eight million dollars. And this is just enough space to house the current amount of death row inmates. What happens when these inmates are still living while more people are getting sentenced to LWOP? More expansions? More taxpayers’ money being thrown into this multi-million dollar project that is not even necessary? The government would have no choice but to build more facilities that could house these criminals. That is even more of our taxpayers’ money, more workers’ time spent, and more criminals that would otherwise be put to death that we now have to accommodate. If we rid the United States of the death penalty our government would be opening a floodgate releasing nothing but angry citizens, exhausted workers, and dangerous criminals that should be dead to begin with.
Something other than our prisons that is already overcrowded are our court systems (Messerli). With the amount of personal time and cost requirements it takes to carry out a criminal trial it only makes sense that our system would come up with the idea of a “plea bargain”. A plea bargain is when the accused admits guilt to the crime they are being tried for in exchange for a lesser sentence. The death penalty comes in handy during plea bargains used in criminal court cases because it actually acts like and overlooking grim reaper sitting in the back of the courtroom. In other words, criminals being charger with murder, or really anything, do not want to be put to death, so why not at least use the death penalty to scare them into LWOP? The tactic of plea-bargaining saves time in trial and money spent on the trial. Something else to consider is the chance that the trial may be lost and the criminal gets off scot-free. The system would have spent money on carrying out this trial and attempting to sentence the accused to death and all would be a waste if the trial were lost. Some may argue that the tactic is a waste of money spent of lethal injection because it is not actually getting used on the criminals that deserve it. To rebut that argument one would say plea-bargaining is not always used in criminal cases. Plenty of criminals would still be sentenced to death. Plea-bargaining is only going to be used in cases where the evidence against the accused in not as strong as it needs to be in order to convince a jury to find the defendant guilty. In any other case where the prosecutor has evidence that is strong enough to give them the confidence to ask for the death penalty, they will not hesitate to get a conviction. This ensures that most of the criminals who deserve the death penalty will plead guilty and be put on death row but even the ones who are not put on death row will be, without a doubt, sentenced to life without parole. Having the death penalty as that “over-looking grim reaper” is essential when trying to get a plea bargain of LWOP. Without it the sentences being offered with the plea bargains would be less severe and the tactic would be less effective in putting the criminal away for as long as they deserve.
There has always been a sense of fear in certain death penalty cases that the accused may actually be innocent. If the accused in a case was convicted and eventually put to death but later found to have been innocent would the court system be able to handle that sort of scandal? After something like that happening the court would be under constant scrutiny from the general public, especially from friends and family of the deceased. But the court system can put its mind to rest knowing that in this day and age with the technology that we have there is little to no space for error or mistake in the science of proving someone guilty (Messerli). DNA testing is used in just about every criminal case that goes to trial (Messerli). DNA evidence is something that cannot be easily overlooked considering it ties one person and one person only specifically to something such as a murder weapon, a crime scene, or even a body. “DNA testing is over 99 percent effective. And even if DNA testing and other such scientific methods didn’t exist, the trial and appeals process is so thorough it’s next to impossible to convict an innocent person” (Messerli). Need you be reminded that each trial has a jury of twelve members that must all agree on whether the accused is innocent or guilty? This decision must be unanimous and there mustn’t be even a sliver of reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty in order for the criminal to be convicted. “The number of innocent people that might somehow be convicted is no greater than the number of innocent victims of the murderers who are set free” (Messerli).
“While the evidence tell me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes-mass murder, the rape and murder of a child so heinous that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment” (Obama). So here we have two options; Support capital punishment and the death penalty to enforce justice in our system or pay an astonishingly larger amount of money, create more of a prison overcrowding problem, let more criminals off the hook, and risk throwing away deserved justice in order to keep deadly criminals alive. Without the death penalty it seems as if the whole criminal justice system in less effective, less productive, and less logical. For me the choice is clear but this is where you have to decide for yourself. So what would you rather do? Stand by “and eye for an eye” or “pay an arm and a leg”?
Works Cited
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