Imagine yourself in a 5 by 4 feet sell with white walls. Thinking to yourself. I only have a couple of hours left to my death for a crime that I didn’t commit and you say to your self. Why me?
This is what happen to Cameron Todd Willingham an owner of a home and the father of 3 children. Cameron was accused of setting his own house on fire and threfore killing his 3 children. He received the death penalty for these crimes. Cameron issued appeals after appeals maintaining his innocense throughout the trial. Unforchanately these appeals wered igonored by the state of Texas and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and a Texas jury found Cameron Todd Willingham guilty on mistaken testimony of officials who had investigated the scene. Later on in 2004 cameron was excuted. Cameron was excuted even though a few days before the excution govenor Rick Perry received a report written by an arson expert that the fire could not have been intentional and therefore Cameron was innocent but the govenor rejected the report and only 2 years after the execution when nothing could be done to bring back Cameron is that state officials recognize that this execution was an error. In other words Cameron Todd Willingham died in vain.
Acording to www.deathpenaltyinfo.org “A total of 69 people have been released from death row since 1973 after evidence of their innocence emerged, many of these cases were discovered not because of the normal appeals process, but rather as a result of new scientific techniques, investigations by journalists, and the dedicated work of expert attorneys, not available to the typical death row inmate”. So ask yourself what about if scientist had never discovered the process called DNA. How many more people will have been wrongfully excuted.
Another reason why the United States should abolish the death penalty is because the death penalty is more expenseive then keeping an inmmate in life incarceration. According to msnbc “In California, home to the nation's biggest death row population at 667, it costs an extra $90,000 per inmate to imprison someone sentenced to death — an additional expense that totals more than $63.3 million annually”. Many of you may ask why does a death penalty trail cost so much? There are several reasons; most of the time death penalty cases require several lawyers, also appeals, and also processing evidence like DNA testing and inmates having individual cells. In 2007 New Jersey became the first state to ban executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine commuted the executions of 10 men to life imprisonment without parole because legal cost was to expensive after spending 4.2million for each death sentence in the past. So ask your self is the death penalty worth the money and risk of killing an innocent person? Also ask yourself do you think an imperfect human being has the right to excute another person who is also imperfect. What happen if you are repented of your wrong doings? Mr. Williams…
