The death penalty cuts down on the number of criminals that are in prisons, wasting away taxpayer's money. Every year, taxpayers pay over $1,500,000,000 to operate and maintain, state prisons. That means every taxpaying adult in the state spends about $1900.00 for prisons. A lot of that money could be saved if all of the killers and rapists in the prisons were put to death. It would be one of the better ways of balancing the budget. The money wasted could be used to help to improve law enforcement.
Most of the killers and rapists in prisons haven't, technically, committed a capital crime. The only way they would be considered for the death penalty is if the prosecution in their court case said from the beginning of the first trial that they would be considered for the death penalty. Most prosecution won't do that if they think it would decrease their chances of winning a case. Most capital cases are only won if the defendant has committed premeditated murder, murder committed in the course of a felony such as armed robbery, murder with depraved indifference and cruelty, or murder of a police officer. There are some obvious exceptions to this, but for the most part that is the case.
Now there are obviously some of you who are thinking 'What if the prisoner is innocent?' or "It is better to save one innocent person than to kill ten guilty people" or "that by killing an innocent we are committing a crime just as foul or worse than the original committed." First of all, a deliberate intention to kill the innocent occurs in a murder, however no such intention occurs in wrongful capital punishment, so in no way is the death penalty as bad or worse than the original crime. Another thing is, can we expect people to it to be true for every fifty, a hundred, or even a thousand that saving one life is worth it. "Society has a right to protect itself from capital offenses even if this means taking a finite chance of executing an innocent person (Pojman, Louis P.
