Death Row

An author who posted an editorial in The New York Times on September 27, 2009 argued that death row is “immoral, does not deter murder and affects minorities disproportionately — we can add one more. It’s an economic drain on governments with already badly depleted budgets.” This argument is directed towards all states that uses the death penalty. The author catches the audiences’ attention by bring up a matter that practically affects everyone and that is money. By talking about the millions of tax dollars that is spent on maintaining death row of course it is going to seize the interest of many people, especially during this time of economic crises.

The basic argument in this editorial is that the nation should do away with the death penalty. The assumption is that hopefully the audiences would feel that the death penalty is one of the most useless actions that is still in practice or at least one that is just flat out simply wrong.

The author does use facts and evidences in the editorial to help support the argument. The author picks out some states and focuses on the amount of money that is being spent each year to maintain death row. An example of this would be in the fifth paragraph of the article where the author talked about how North Carolina has put 43 people to death since 1976 at 2.16 million per execution. The author also talks about how the senator of Kansas pointed out that her state has “not executed anyone in more than 40 year and that she wishes to replace capital punishment with life without parole” in the sixth paragraph.

I feel that this was a pretty good argument but it does not win me over. This is because I feel that the death penalty is a very justified punishment. If there was a serial killer out there who murdered dozens of people I would want that person dead. I would not want that person to get life without the possibility of parole. That would mean the taxes taken out from my paycheck goes to feeding the person and keeping them alive until they die. I do not want that, I would like to pay for them to die. And in this editorial where that author says that death row is “an economic drain on governments with already badly depleted budgets.” I disagree that one should look at death row like that. In this time of economic crises it is easy to point a finger at anything that coast money and say that it is a problem.

The significances of this would be that no one ever really had a problem with death row until the recession started. I feel like people are looking for anything to blame at this point. People are mad and upset about the recession; people are losing job; money is tight. People want something to blame, it’s as simple as that.