ARCHIVE - September, 2001

Rethinking the Death Penalty
Michael Radelet, Department of Sociology

One of the reasons why the State of Colorado is unable to supply the funding necessary to support a first-rate system of higher education is that it is pouring millions of dollars into finding more work for the state's executioner. A variety of studies have been conducted in recent years by legislators, newspapers, and scholars that all reach the same conclusion: each execution costs states upwards of $4 million -- about five times the cost of life imprisonment. Recently, however, there have been a number of indications that Americans are beginning to question whether the benefits of the death penalty are worth these (and other) costs.

Public support for the death penalty, which has dropped dramatically since the mid-1990s, is based primarily on the belief that those convicted of first-degree murder, if not executed, will be released back into our communities in a few short years. In reality, Colorado and the vast majority of other states that use the death penalty mandate firm life-without-parole sentences for convicted murderers who are not sentenced to death. Given that life-without-parole option, recent polls have found that less than half of all Americans retain pro-death penalty positions.

The United States is one of the increasingly few countries in the world that retain the use of the death penalty. The top five executing countries in 2000 were China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. These are not normally countries with whom we share our human rights policies.

In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily banned the death penalty, but it was reinstated in 1976. Since then, approximately 725 inmates in the US have been executed. Another 100 inmates have been released from death row when it was discovered -- usually by pure luck -- that their convictions and death sentences were imposed in spite of innocence. Today some 3,700 men and 54 women are awaiting their deaths on America's death rows.

Colorado has six men on its death row in Canon City. Just over 100 men have been executed in the state's history; the most recent was in 1997. In an effort to increase these numbers, in 1995 the state decided to remove juries from making life and death decisions because these citizens were too reluctant to impose death. Today, death penalty decisions in Colorado are made by three judges (usually affluent white males who someday will stand for reelection).

America's religious leaders and increasingly joining with civil rights and human rights activists in calling for an end to the death penalty. Such conservative voices as columnist George Will, Illinois Republican George Ryan, evangelist Pat Robertson, and former Attorney General Janet Reno have also recently spoken out against the death penalty.

Worst of all, the death penalty allows politicians to create the false impression that they are doing something constructive either to fight crime or to render effective aid to families of homicide victims. Instead of asking "Who deserves to die," we might ask ourselves, "Who deserves to kill?"

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