Appeals and re-trials enabled the three convicted murderers to elude execution for many years. Though legal tactics earned the men longer lives, they cost Arkansas a great deal in prosecution costs. Such judicial maneuvers characterize the cases of many death row inmates. In fact, a 1994 Supreme Court report found that the average condemned prisoner avoids execution for 9 1/2 years through court appeals. Demonstrating the high cost of these appeals, a 1993 study showed that the execution of one death row prisoner costs $3 million to $10 million, while a life sentence costs only $500,000. The legal expense makes the death penalty a financially inefficient mode of punishment.
Given that death-penalty states have murder rates similar to other states, capital punishment has deterred murder no more effectively than life sentencing. Therefore, states employing capital punishment spend more money on a system that yields no appreciable benefit over the cheaper life-sentencing system.
The problems of the death penalty extend beyond the financial realm. The current system of capital punishment reflects the racial bias of America's judicial system. A late 1995 Congressional Record report showed that blacks convicted of killing whites are 63 times more likely to be executed than whites who kill blacks. In fact, 92 percent of those executed in this country since 1976 killed white victims, though almost half of all homicide victims during that period were black. According to the figures, race plays a role in determining whether a court takes a person's life. Capital punishment policies enable judicial racism to take the harshest form possible: murder.
Factors such as racial bias have rendered the country's judicial system imperfect, allowing erroneous rulings to seep out of courtrooms. Imposing an immutable punishment, such as death, does not enable courts to accommodate for incorrect rulings once the convicted have been executed.
A 1990 Congressional Record report showed that U.S. courts have sentenced to death at least 350 innocent people since 1900, resulting in the execution of at least 25 innocent people. In fact, a Mother Jones study estimates that courts will posthumously acquit at least seven people now condemned. Though courts often fail to rule accurately, the death penalty allows no room for error. The abolition of capital punishment would prevent courts from taking more innocent lives.
Though the monstrous crimes that the three executed Arkansas men committed warranted severe punishment, courts should not have imposed the death penalty. The financial inefficiency, the racial bias and the finality of this form of government-regulated violence make it an unfit form of punishment. As the only industrialized Western nation that has not abolished penal execution, the United States should follow the suit of other countries that have discarded the death penalty in favor of more proper forms of punishment.