The Cost Of Morals

Amnesty International objects to execution of criminals, no matter how heinous the crime and its issued its annual round up of state executions .....

Recorded Execution Worldwide 2019 .....

... as part of this its director for research said; "The death penalty is an abhorrent and inhuman punishment; and there is no credible evidence that it deters crime more than prisons terms ..."

 
Which may be true. It appears this statement is based upon a study in the US by the National Research Council that concluded that there was no evidence that having the death penalty in place deters crime or murders.

However the alternative to execution is keeping murderers in prison for the whole of their life (or a portion of it), at a considerable expense to society. e.g in the UK in 2016/17, across England and Wales, it cost an average of £37,543 a year to keep a prisoner in jail, and that amount rises by around 5 - 6 per cent each year. So, if we say 30 years before release or death (and that's unusual in the UK, as we shall discuss below), means it can cost the UK tax payers as much as £1,126,290 per life sentence prisoner.

There is a counter argument, that if the death penalty was introduced back into the UK, it would cost much more than life sentences because of the appeals processes. This argument states that in the US, the average cost of defending a person facing the federal death penalty is approx $620,932. This, its stated, is about eight times that of defending a federal murder case in which the death penalty is not sought.

Based on these figures, a study of the death penalty cases in California, found that since 1978 the cost of imposing the death penalty had reached more than $4billion dollars, in that state alone. The same costs of defence would therefore apply in the UK.

I am not convinced by these arguments, as these costings are based on the US processes, which give almost unlimited appeal chances via various legal stratagems that wouldn't necessarily apply in the UK (including requirements for Governors signatures or pardons). In reality, one appeal should be the limit and sentence executed if that was unsuccessful. 

Prison Time Served For Murder UK ....

But of course with no death penalty, the cost of taking a life is demeaned, with this reflected in the actual prison time served for taking a life. In some countries, the length of times served for murder may be barely a decade (in the case of some murders), before they are eligible for consideration of parole.

In the UK, one exceptional case (for assisted suicide), resulted in a release being granted after just  three years and seven months. But others have also been released after serving as little as 7.4 years, and in all, 26 life sentence prisoners have been released having served under 10 years of a life sentence for murder.

Overall the UK average time served for taking another persons life is still just 16.5 years (a life should equal a life) .... about 10% of prisoners released between 2010 and 2018 having served time for murder, had served under 10 years, and only about 10% had served more than 24 years. This practice of releasing people given a life sentence for murder, has resulted in the sad fact that between January 2007 and May 2015, a total of 12 people in the UK were murdered by people, who had previously been convicted of murder, sentenced, and then released.

A life sentence should mean whole of life, and taking another persons life (apart from self defence or other exceptional cases e.g. defending another persons life or possibly assisting suicide in certain cases), should always result in a life sentence. Any other argument in my mind is just as immoral as Amnesty think a death penalty sentence is.

However, one strange 'fact' emerged from writing this post ... that is that apparently, the US states practising capital punishment, have murder rates at least 48% higher than the states with no death penalty. I don't know if this fact is true, or if anyone has worked out why this may be true.

This subject always raises strong opinions, but as long as there are people committing terrible crimes, what to do with them will continue to be debated.