Why Capital Punishment is not effective

Capital punishment is the death of a prisoner, after an effective officially sanctioned trial, as a penalty for a particular offence. Only the state can carry out death sentences, but if a non-statutory agency executes an individual, it has committed murder in the real sense of the word. Capital punishment is generally extended only as a penalty to mainly severe kinds of assassinations, but some countries are known as capital criminals for some kinds of theft, abuse, incitement to rebellion and infidelity. Many nations around the globe do use the capital punishment, and according to the Amnesty International, 141 countries have put an end to the death sentence either in the act or the decree, that is as at May 2012 (BBC p 5). Capital punishment is such a controversial, expensive, and a harsh matter that, unless it thrives in saving the life of citizens, which it has never done, there should be its abolition.Operating a capital punishment regime is extremely costly as every case resulting in the death verdict does always take many years in different types of legal petitions, taking up the precious time of the adjudicators, and the legal representatives, devastatingly at the expense of the government. Research on the issue puts forward that life incarceration is not an expensive sentence since locking up an individual is much cheaper than putting them in custody and paying a team of lawyers for many years while still debating whether there should be the imposing of the death penalty. In California, for instance, the death sentence is the third principal cause of fatality for the persons on the penalty line up just after old age and suicide (Donohue p 4). If it was expensive but aids in preventing future crime, it would have been better, but it adds no value to the matter and thus is not all that important.Some people may state that the long-lasting pleas are hindrances that are unnecessary and there should be their discarding so that the administration of the penalty is more reasonably and speedily. On the other hand, a large number of individuals on the death row clearing from accusations undertake the risk of any endeavor to shorten the legal procedure. The assassination of a small number of blameless accused persons is an unpreventable effect of running a capital government; as a result, unless there is understandable rationale of evading, it becomes hard to have words to support the capital punishment (Donohue and Wolfers 3).There is no least convincing statistical proof that death penalty lessens the cases of murder globally. Whether one evaluates the equivalent actions of homicide around the world for instance in Hong Kong that abolished the act in 1990 and Singapore that has ever increased the utilization of death penalty, there is no obvious consequence of capital punishment on the offense. Another example is the US and Canada after its restoration in the former and abolition in the latter, and still, there is no significant difference in the pattern of crime between the two countries. If the death penalty was all that effective, then the U.S would not have the cases of murder compared with Canada. Some investigations alleged to discover the prevention results; however, all failed following the coding errors or computing the level of statistical significance (ABC p 13). In the year 2012, a board of National Academy of Sciences had a direct address of the avoidance issue and ended in a common conclusion that there is no way the capital punishment has been beneficial in taming the cases of homicides. The report went further in stating that there should be the removal of the problem of deterrence from the topic of death penalty following the lack of reasonable proof (Donohue p 7). If for sure the penalty encourages prevention, then why would still be young Americans in jail due to the cases of murder?The best way to deal with the predicament of murder or any other capital offense is by taking the funds that would or else go to waste in managing a capital regime and utilize them on the other means that have been helpful in eradicating crime such as the use of rehabilitation centers. After all, what is the sense of killing citizens for the crimes committed in the neighborhood if there are no enough law enforcers and better solutions to crimes to curb the individuals from the criminal acts? It would be far much better if the resources accumulated by doing away with the capital punishment could undergo diversion to increase the chances of catching and taking off of the streets the offenders for the appropriate penalties. Just to give a view of the death penalty’s burden, it is worth noticing that the state of California used almost $4 billion in the execution of thirteen people. The amount could have been enough in hiring about 80,000 law enforcers and could have prevented 446 cases of murder and the American prisons would not have the usual congestions.Since the capital punishment is an expensive and meaningless plan, its application will waste the government funds that could be spent on the measures of fighting of crimes that have proved to be successful. The steady fall of the states eliminating the death sentence over the past years inclusion of the May’s conservative Nebraska indicates that avoiding the capital punishment is the only way to be smart on crime.Works CitedABC. "Fact Check: No Proof the Death Penalty Prevents Crime - Fact Check." ABC News, 2016, www.abc.net.au/news/factcheck/2015-02-26/fact-check3a-does-the-death-penalty-deter3f/6116030.BBC. "BBC - Ethics - Capital Punishment: Introduction." BBC - Home, 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/capitalpunishment/intro.shtml.Donohue, John. "There's No Evidence That Death Penalty is a Deterrent against Crime." The Conversation, 8 Aug. 2015, theconversation.com/theres-no-evidence-that-death-penalty-is-a-deterrent-against-crime-43227.Donohue, John J., and Justin Wolfers. "The Death Penalty: No Evidence for Deterrence." DPIC | Death Penalty Information Center, Apr. 2006, deathpenaltyinfo.org/files/pdf/DonohueDeter.pdf.