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Academic writing part B, The Death Penalty an Unnecessary Evil
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Academic writing part 2Number of words: 1167
The date of submission: 05/06/2021
The Death Penalty an Unnecessary Evil
On March 24th, Virginia became the first southern state and the 23rd in the United States of
America to abolish the death penalty. Governor Ralph Northam, who stated that the death
penalty was fundamentally flawed, signed the bill to abolish the penalty. However, not all
states in America agree, as 27 of the 50 states still allow for the death penalty to be used
(McDonald & Smolinski, 2021). The death penalty, otherwise known as capital punishment,
is a punishment where people are executed for a capital crime that they have committed.
Different ways exist in which the death penalty is executed, although the most commonly
used execution method is the use of a lethal injection (Death Penalty Information Center,
2019). Within the last decade, about half of the states, which allow the death penalty, made
use of this capital punishment. Most of the executions occurred in Texas; namely, 538
people were executed, of which the last one was in 2019 (Death Penalty States 2021, 2021).
As governor Ralph Northam said, Amnesty International (2019) believes that the death
penalty is an unnecessary evil way to punish someone for a crime. Thus, the United States of
America should abolish the death penalty as it is costly, inhumane and does not deter crime.
Firstly, the United States of America should abolish the death penalty as it costs more than a
lifelong prison sentence. A lifelong prison sentence means that a person who committed a
crime will be in prison until they die in prison; this is also called life imprisonment without
parole. The costs of death penalty trials and lifelong imprisonment trials per state can differ.
For instance, in Kansas, for a non-capital trial, the defence costs are around $100.000. In
comparison, in trials in which the death penalty is sought, the defence costs are $400.000 (as
cited by Death Penalty Information Center, 2021, p. 4). According to the State of Connecticut
Commission on the Death Penalty, the costs of capital punishment is at least $200.000 more
than a life imprisonment sentence (Roman, Chalfin, Sundquist, Knight, & Darmenov, 2008,
pp. 7-8). A reason for such a difference between the costs of life imprisonment and the
death penalty is that in capital cases, the defence and the state arrange for more appeals
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