Is Capital Punishment a Capital Idea?

Last Thursday, a former death-row inmate delivered one of the best talks I've seen at Georgetown.

Prison Outreach, our campus group that tutors local inmates for their GEDs and in ESL, brought Juan Melendez to campus. He spent nearly 18 years on death row in Florida for a crime he didn't commit, living with incredible depression and in terrible conditions, until he was finally released in 2002. The story he told was incredibly powerful, but far from unique -- he was the ninety-ninth of 123 death row inmates to be exonerated and released since 1973.

The death penalty:

• Kills the innocent.


• Is racist.


• Does not deter crime. (States without the death penalty have lower homicide rates than states with the death penalty.)


• Costs the state an extra $1-$3 million per execution. (This money could be spent on education, cops on street corners, after-school programs, hospitals, and other public goods that would in turn reduce crime.)

And as far as Democrats and the death penalty?

• "In 2004, ... the drafting committee quietly removed the section of the [Democratic party platform] that endorsed capital punishment." (source)


• "Eighty percent of Republicans support the death penalty, ... and 58% of Democrats support it." (source)

I'd never formed a coherent opinion on the death penalty. I had been avoiding doing so, despite three years of work with Prison Outreach and the tidbits of information I get from my inmates about their lives in that state-of-the-art detention facility. This speech on Thursday, however, shocked me into awareness. This man was incredibly alive -- and it was just a fluke in our justice system that he still was. The fluke was in the innocent man surviving.

Unless you are from one of the thirteen jurisdictions without a death penalty statue,* consider writing your governors, legislators, and state leaders. Imprisonment is one thing. Death is another.

*AK, DC, HI, IA, ME, MA, MI, MN, ND, RI, VT, WV, WI