Money is the new morality.
The turn itself is significant. In the United States, we have now exonerated some 130 people on death row. We have dozens of studies proving racial discrimination in the administration of death, and case after case showing the persistence of woefully inadequate defense counsel. On their own, these issues have not moved us.
Abolishing the death penalty didn't make sense until it made dollars and cents.
In the drive to eliminate capital punishment, I suppose a money argument that works is better than a moral argument that doesn't. But there is a larger cost to monetizing the death penalty debate, a cost to sparing an individual's life simply because it is not worth taking. We have reason enough to make the right call on the death penalty without it.
I agree with Lain that focusing on the financial expenses of the system misses the larger arguments that need to be made, but even her list of other things that should have moved us ignores the moral question at the very heart of the death penalty: is it ever right for the government to intentionally take the life of one of its citizens?
Questions of innocence and racial/economic prejudice are certainly important and effective topics for the abolitionist movement to focus on. Yet they are actually similar to the cost issue in that they suggest that if a list of acknowledged problems were "solved," capital punishment would somehow become acceptable. No matter how effective these arguments may be in the short term, they will fail when the abolitionist movement reaches the states that are clinging to the death penalty most doggedly--the people there firmly believe that their support of capital punishment is in keeping with what God wants for humanity. Speeches about money or lawyers or DNA evidence will sound hollow without equally strong moral arguments to back them up, and the abolitionist movement will ultimately fail unless it adjusts itself accordingly.
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