John Coffey's Arguments Against The Death Penalty

Capital punishment is the legally authorized killing of a person as punishment for a heinous crime. In the movie, The Green Mile, well-known for its prison setting and scenes of inmates on death row getting the electric chair, one of the main characters, John Coffey, gets the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit. In the last few scenes of the heart wrenching movie, another lead character named Paul Edgecomb says, “It’s my punishment for letting John Coffey ride the lightning (electric chair); for killing a miracle of God.” Although this is not based on a true story, it highlights the wrongdoing within the government’s punishment. This is one of the few but many cases when the defendant is not guilty. There is always that, “What if 99

According to Amnesty International, a human rights organization, the United States ranks fifth in the top 10 countries that impose the most executions world-wide. In fact, as of 2012, the U.S. executed only 36 fewer people than its war enemy, Iraq (Rogers and Chalabi). According to Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (OADP), since capital punishment was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976, 138 people were removed from death row after later being found not guilty (“Facts”). Byler points out that proponents of capital punishment may say that if we kill 99 guilty people, and only one innocent person, then the benefit is greater than the detriment. However, this very thinking contradicts our justice system that believes a defendant is “innocent until proven guilty,” by basically saying that justice doesn’t even pertain to capital punishment. You can’t say justice is being served and the person is innocent until proven guilty when you have the wrong person sitting in their cell on death row. Still, proponents believe our justice system should be principled on the proverb “an eye for an eye.” However, Byler goes on to argue, “Nobody advocates punishing rapists with rape or molesting molesters, yet the death penalty is deemed an appropriate response to violent crime” (Byler). And so opponents of the death penalty argue: Why can’t

The government is going broke! Just because of the death penalty system (created by the government) is so remarkably procrastinating, irreconcilable, and inefficient. Voters are beginning to despise the death penalty because it now costs a substantial amount of money to execute a killer rather locking the inmate up forever. Recently The Economist stated in the newspaper, “In Maryland, for example, it cost three times more—until last year, when the state abolished capital punishment. Governor Martin O’Malley cited the cost as one reason for pressing for abolition.” Therefore, the actual cost of the death penalty includes all the added expenses of the "unsuccessful" trials in which capital punishment is strived for but not successful. In addition, if the defendant is convicted but not given the death sentence, the state will be liable for the costs of life imprisonment, in addition to the increased trial expenses (Dieter). According to Drehle in the Death of the Death Penalty, “When I examined the cost of Florida’s death penalty many years ago, I concluded that seeing a death sentence through to execution costs at least six times as much as a life sentence.” Insisting on this quote from many years ago, we can only infer that the costs will increase. Substantially, in fact, recent study shows that it was