New York Times on Capital Punishment

On September 8th, Daniel Lachance of the New York Times wrote a scathing piece on the current penal system, eviscerating the policy of our country having the death penalty. The article began with,  " To opponents of the death penalty, recent accounts of botched executions and DNA-based exonerations of death-row prisoners have revived hope that judges and voters will finally see capital punishment for what it is: an intolerable affront to human dignity." Lachance then calmed down a bit and delved into his reasoning. He cites the inability of the government to put down death row inmates quickly. "As late as 1959, most of those executed spent less than two years on death row...inmates put to death in 2012 had waited an average of almost 16 years for their execution date." He goes on to say that this is because not enough lawyers want to take on these cases, so inmates will have to wait years for a government appointed lawyer while they appeal. Lachance's main point in this article is that if we are going to convince others to abolish the death penalty it will not be through the argument of morality, but rather the argument of money. He says that we should argue that the death penalty is a waste of our own tax money, and by abolishing it we would save a buck, which is easier to get behind than "save the mass murderer because the death penalty is unfair".

I personally agree with Lachance on this piece. Waiting 16 years to be executed is absurd, especially when you take into account the cost of housing a criminal for that time just for them to die at the hands of the state. It is also a bit strange that capital punishment is up to the state to decide. Is a murder in Texas really worse than a murder in Massachusetts? I think that the supreme court should have decided in 1972 to either make it legal or illegal, not declare it unconstitutional but leave it for the states to deal with. Now we have a national debate that really should have been cleared up years ago. Either way, I agree with Lachance in that the death penalty is not worth it for the cost it has.