Eye-for-eye mentality is costly, uncertain, senseless

The death penalty doesn’t work ... unless all you want is vengeance.

The purposes of criminal punishment are deterrence, rehabilitation, restitution, incapacitation and retribution. In a death-penaltyeligible case, we are not concerned about rehabilitation, which has fallen by the wayside as all such programs have been defunded wholesale; incapacitation is already a given; and we are not concerned about restitution, as such a defendant will usually never have a life outside a prison cell. Retribution-vengeance is all that remains to justify death.

While there is a general deterrent effect to all sentencing, none of the studies suggest that the death penalty offers any additional deterrence. The reasons are obvious: We must understand that the overwhelming majority of death-penalty-eligible offenses in Florida occur under the felony-murder theory, meaning a death occurs during the commission of a felony. In those cases, the death is not even intended, so how are you deterred by the threat of facing the death penalty for a homicide you didn’t plan? You can’t be.

Further, to be effective, deterrence requires certainty and swiftness. If consequences may not happen, or may not happen for decades, any deterrent effect evaporates. Yet, in an attempt to retain the death penalty, Florida and other states have been compelled to develop an expensive and prolonged appellate process to safeguard a death inmate’s constitutional rights.

Attempting to kill with the death penalty is not only very expensive; more importantly, it’s imperfect. In a criminal-justice system already budgetcrunched to the point where we are barely offering our citizens true justice to begin with, the presumed though never well-defined benefits of the death penalty are far outweighed by the undeniable costs.

With an average life expectancy of a life-sentenced defendant of 40 years, at $20,000 per year, that totals $800,000 to house an inmate until he dies of natural causes. The average death-penalty case from arrest through execution will cost somewhere between $2 million and $10 million, according to widely varied estimates. Florida dedicates approximately $51 million per year to the resources required system-wide to have a death-penalty process, from the prosecutors, judges, capital counsel fees and costs, to the appellate courts, up to and including the Supreme Court of Florida, which spends a great deal of its time on death cases.

However, the greatest argument to mothball the ancient eye-foran-eye mentality is that it is simply too imperfect. Even with all the procedural safeguards, the intense appellate review and the certainty we try to build into death sentences, we still get it wrong. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, between 1989 and 2015, 1,600 criminal cases were cleared by exoneration after conviction, defined as the person factually didn’t do the crime — no legal fancy footwork, just plain innocence. Of the defendants in those cases, 111 were sentenced to death, and 13 of them were actually executed. Yet, they were factually innocent.

Why are we willing to sacrifice even one innocent life for such an imperfect death-penalty system? One precept of our criminal-justice system that sets us far apart from others is that we agree we would rather let 100 guilty men go free than incarcerate one innocent man. Yet, we are all right with killing 111?

So, must we either kill them or let them walk free? Of course not. Don’t forget, in Florida, the sole alternative to death for first-degree murder is a life sentence, which means you only leave prison in a pine box. There is no parole in Florida, period.

In 1945, the year the United Nations was created, only eight countries had abolished the death penalty; today, there are 102 that have said “no more.” Yet the United States holds itself out as the model for protection of civil rights and of individual liberties, and still we kill our own.

So, why are we so hellbent on being a society that voluntarily kills? Once again, the only explanation is that primitive, limbic brain response of blind, senseless vengeance.

Why are we willing to sacrifice even one innocent life for such an imperfect system?