Summary: Since Canada abolished capital punishment in 1976, crime rates have decreased, and over sixty other countries around the world have followed suit, abolishing capital punishment for all crimes. As of 2008, over 130 countries have abolished capital punishment either in fact or in principle, yet sixty countries still use it, including the United States. Capital punishment is ineffective as a deterrent to crime and is costly to society, in both financial and human terms.

Capital Punishment in Canada

On December 11, 1962, two men were hanged at the Don Jail in Toronto, Canada. Arthur Lucas and Donald Turpin were the last two men executed under the death penalty in Canada. Lucas, an American, had been convicted of shooting an Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) officer on an undercover operation in Toronto, while Turpin killed a Toronto police officer who stopped him for a traffic offence while he was running from a robbery. Lucas and Turpin joined the 708 other men and women who were executed under the death penalty in Canada, and their bodies were buried in an unmarked grave in Toronto.

Between 1867 and 1962, 1,481 people were sentenced to death in Canada. From 1869 until 1961, there were only three crimes for which capital punishment was given, including murder, rape, and treason. Rape was removed from the list in 1954, and murder was divided into capital and non-capital cases in 1961. Although all death sentences in effect in 1967 were commuted to life sentences without the possibility of parole for twenty-five years and capital punishment for murder was officially abolished in 1976, the death penalty was still legal as a punishment for certain military offences until 1998.

Capital Punishment Does Not Deter Crime

The US Death Penalty Information Center tracks the murder rates in the thirty-eight US states that use capital punishment as a sentence, and in the twelve states that do not. In every year listed, from 1990 to 2006, the non-death penalty states had lower murder rates than the death penalty states. Since 2000, the rate has been on average 40 percent lower in the twelve states that do not use capital punishment.

Canada's murder rate peaked at 3.03 per 100,000 people in 1975. After capital punishment was abolished in 1976, the murder rate has decreased to 1.85 murders per 100,000 people in 2006. Another telling statistic, the number of police officers killed in the line of duty, has remained steady since it began to be measured in 1961 (when murders were divided into capital and non-capital cases). Since 1961, 128 police officers have been killed in Canada, an average of three per year. In contrast, in the United States, which has approximately eight times the population of Canada, forty-eight officers were killed in 2006 alone.

The theory that the possibility of capital punishment will stop a murder from occurring fails to take into account the fact that most murders are not planned. Only first degree murder was considered a capital offense in Canada, and most countries that still use capital punishment limit it to first degree murder. In 2005, 45 percent of the 663 homicides in Canada were deemed to be first degree, meaning that they were planned or deliberate, that the victim was a law enforcement officer, or that the homicide took place as part of a sexual assault or kidnapping.

Capital Punishment Costs More than Life Imprisonment

Since Canada no longer uses capital punishment, it is not possible to say what the cost of the death penalty would be in Canada. For a comparison, the state of California will be used, as both Canada and California have a population of 33 million.

In 2005, the Los Angeles Times estimated that maintaining the death penalty cost the state $114 million more than if California did not use capital punishment. That figure does not include the extra money spent on preparing for capital cases, only the money spent after an accused has been sentenced to death. Half of that cost, or $57 million, is made up by the extra money needed to house a prisoner on death row. Death row inmates at California's San Quentin State Prison each have their own cell and extra guards, and in 2005, California had 640 inmates on death row. These inmates cost an average of $90,000 more than the cost of a non-death row inmate.

One of the reasons for these added costs is the process of appeals that automatically takes place after an accused is given the death penalty. In an effort to make sure that the accused is truly guilty, the state spends years on the appeals process, and the average length of time between initial sentencing and execution is almost twenty years. In fact, between 1978 and 2005, only eleven death row inmates were executed in California, while another forty-two died while waiting. Statistically speaking, twenty-eight of these prisoners from natural causes, twelve by suicide, and two were killed by other inmates.

Another factor in the additional cost of capital punishment is the extra costs associated with prosecuting a capital case. A 1993 study in California showed that a capital murder case cost the state $1.9 million dollars, compared to $630,000 for a non-capital case. Studies in other states have also found that capital cases generally cost three times as much and at every stage, capital cases take longer to prosecute, with more work to be done by police officers and investigators, more complex and lengthy trials, and guaranteed appeals. The number of capital murder cases is decreasing in many states because the costs are simply too high for prosecutors to push the cases forward.

Capital Punishment Can Make Fatal Mistakes

Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated in the US and abolished in Canada, 1099 people have been executed. Over that same period, 120 people have been released from death row after the appeals of their original cases ended in either acquittal or their charges being dismissed. While it is not possible to know how many of those who were executed were not guilty, the Death Penalty Information Center lists eight cases where there is strong evidence for innocence. Technological advances in evidence collecting and analysis have had a major role in these reversals, and many cases have been overturned when DNA analysis showed that the convicted person was not in fact responsible. In other cases, eyewitnesses have recanted their testimony or been revealed to be police informants whose testimony could not be considered reliable.

In Canada, there have been several high-profile cases of murder convictions being overturned. David Milgaard served twenty-two years in prison for a murder that he did not commit, a murder that would have resulted in a capital case if the death sentence was still being used in 1969. Donald Marshall Jr. spent eleven years in prison on a murder sentence that was reversed by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, while Guy Paul Morin was convicted of murdering his nine-year-old next door neighbour, and spent three years in prison until DNA evidence cleared of him all charges.

Most disturbing is the case of Stephen Truscott, who was only fourteen when he was sentenced to death for murder in 1959. It took nearly fifty years for Truscott, who had maintained his innocence from the beginning, to be acquitted of the crime. In August 2007, the Ontario Court of Appeal declared that the conviction had been a miscarriage of justice. Although Truscott's death sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1960, and he was eventually paroled in 1969, it is a glaring example of the fact that the justice system does not always exonerate the innocent and punish only the guilty.

The only way to make sure that capital punishment does not kill the innocent is to remove the death sentence. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the US in 1976, 241 individuals have had their death sentences commuted to life in prison. These commutations are done by the governor of the state in which the prisoner is on death row. In more than twenty of the 241 cases, the governor listed the possibility of innocence as a reason for the commutation.

Ponder This

1. How clear is the author's argument? Are there portions of the argument that require clarification? Which of the author's arguments against capital punishment is the most compelling? Why? Which of the author's arguments against capital punishment is the least compelling? Why?

· 2. Do you think the use of California as a comparison to Canada is a good one? Why or why not?

· 3. Do you think the fact that Canada's murder rate has decreased since capital punishment was abolished is a coincidence? If so, what other factors do you think have led to the decrease?

· 4. The author uses statistics to help support the argument. Choose the statistically-based statement that gives the most weight to the author's argument. Explain why you made your choice.

Capital punishment and public safety

For the last two years, debate about the relevance of the Kermit Gosnell case to wider political concerns has focused on the abortion issue. But with Gosnell now found guilty of murder, the possibility of his execution (now removed as the result of a deal struck with prosecutors) has pitted pro-lifers against one another in a debate over the death penalty.

First, Professor Robert George issued a plea for mercy. Ashley McGuire seconded this, arguing that pro-lifers “must stay focused on saving babies, not on killing their killers.” Calling for Gosnell’s execution, McGuire argued, simply perpetuates the culture of death. John Zmirak then disagreed with both George and McGuire, arguing that sparing a murderer the death penalty “shows profound disrespect to his victims.”

Given that all participants in the debate seem to be Catholic, it might be instructive to look at what the Catechism says about capital punishment:

Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

I’d like to ruminate a little on what precisely the Catechism means when it says that authorities should limit themselves to non-lethal forms of punishment if these “are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety.”

Pro-life Catholics who oppose the death penalty generally take an extremely narrow view of what this means. Professor George, for example, has arguedthat “the state does not have the right to inflict capital punishment—no matter how grave the offense and no matter how clear the guilt of the accused—unless effective incarceration is impossible and execution is the only way to prevent this particular murderer from killing again.”

But it is not clear that this is the only possible way of framing the question. The decision of whether to impose the death penalty is not simply at the discretion of a trial judge who is dealing with the case of “this particular murderer.” Legislators will have already specified the offenses that may merit capital punishment, and will usually provide judges with further guidance such as identifying “aggravating factors” (for example, multiple killings) that invite a capital sentence. Whether the death penalty is imposed is conditioned to a large extent by the legislature. The role of the judge is simply to apply the law in a particular case. Even the Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) that ruled mandatory capital punishment as unconstitutional does not leave sentencing simply for judges to decide. The Court upheld sentencing guidelines for capital punishment in Georgia that were wholly pre-determined by the state legislature. It goes without saying that strict guidance from legislators is necessary to avoid arbitrary sentencing by judges; this guidance largely determines how the death penalty operates.

Lawmakers cannot deal with the question of whether to execute this murderer, but only of whether to execute murderers in general. In making a judgment as to whether the death penalty is necessary for the protection of public safety, legislators have to consider more than merely the question of whether “effective incarceration” is theoretically possible. The fact that it is possible not to execute killers doesn’t establish that that it is morally obligatory to do so, particularly when there are arguments to suggest that the overall result of abolishing capital punishment (rather than the result of merely commuting sentence in a particular case) would be to place public safety in jeopardy.

When Dimitry Smirnov killed his ex-girlfriend in Illinois in 2011, prosecutors discovered that he had researched the law on the internet to discover if the state had the death penalty before going ahead with the killing. It is reasonable to assume that if Illinois had not just abolished it, she might be alive today.

It has also been pointed out that, where the death penalty is abolished and life sentences remain for rape, rapists may be more likely to kill their victims in order to prevent them testifying, since the sentence in either case will be identical. The only way to prevent the incentivization of murder is, therefore, to lower the sentences required for a range of other crimes. But these lower sentences simply make those lesser crimes more likely to be committed, and so on. Abolition has a cascade effect down through the criminal justice system that potentially places public welfare at risk. One only needs to look across the Atlantic at Britain, which, within a few decades of abolishing capital punishment, has gone from having one of the most rigorous sentencing systems in the West to one of the most lenient, leading to frequent and widely-supported calls among the general public for the reintroduction of hanging.

Even when abolition is accompanied with mandatory life sentencing for killers, there is no guarantee that future legislators, judges, state governors, and prison officials will honor this. In 1966 Kenneth McDuff was sentenced to death for the killing of two teenage boys and the brutal rape and murder of their female companion. When the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia (1972), his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Under pressure of serious overcrowding in Texas prisons, he was released in 1989. Within three days he had killed again, and over the next three years would go on to kill at least five more women before finally being apprehended. Countless other examples can be cited of killers who have been released or escaped and have gone on to kill again, or who have killed again in prison. Whether or not the death penalty is required as a matter of strict retributive justice, it is morally repugnant for the state to privilege the safety of a violent criminal over the safety of an entire population.

It often happens that those who spend their lives fighting for a particular cause can—particularly when it is as crucial as the pro-life cause—become blinded to other values which are of equal or greater importance. Fighting to ensure due respect for the sanctity of life should not lead us to canonize human life as the ultimate moral value, as if the final destiny of the human person was simply to go on existing without reference to any further end or purpose. Even when considered in purely this-worldly terms, social order is clearly a higher good than human life. Without social order a genuinely human life is impossible, since humans are by nature social animals.

Whether the death penalty is required to maintain social order in a particular country, at a particular time in history, is a prudential judgment upon which reasonable people will disagree. I am not arguing that criminals must be executed as a matter of retributive justice. Nor am I necessarily calling for the death penalty to be reintroduced in places where it has been abolished. Neither am I calling for Kermit Gosnell to be executed (the deal struck in his case seems perfectly reasonable). But, given that it is not inherently unjust to execute a murderer, legislators and judges should err on the side of protecting public safety, a task that is infinitely more complex than asking the simple question of whether we have enough prison places. To fail to execute offenders where it would genuinely protect the commonwealth would be a dereliction of duty on the part of the state. As Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said, “the refusal to impose just punishment is not mercy but cowardice.”

Capital punishment essay
As violence becomes an increasing concern among Canadians, people are calling for the reinstatement of capital punishment. This controversial issue has been ailing politicians and public morality since its abolition in 1976. As one examines the arguments for and against the reinstatement of capital punishment; examples of modern day cases dealing with capital punishment; and statistics on such cases, one can better appreciate the reasons why this barbaric form of punishment should remain in the past.
Unfortunately, like most Americans, many Canadians believe in the barbaric "an eye for an eye" rule of restitution. This belief is the basis for the argument for the reinstatement of the death penalty. Some believe that the death penalty will deter similar crimes from happening, others believe that they would feel safer if a serious offender would be put to eternal rest. Few, suggests that putting these criminals to death would be more economical then putting them behind bars. But all of these people innately believe that "When you take a life, you give up the right to yours." (Why America kills off killers). Beliefs such as these have kept the United States being the only western, first world, industrialized country to retain the cruel and immoral death penalty. This horrific fact puts the United States Government in line with other major human rights offenders such as China, Rwanda, and North Korea (Why America kills off killers).
Convicted murderer Henry M. Porter offered this statement on his death bed;
"What I want people to know is that they call me a cold-blooded killer. I shot a man who shot me first. The only thing that convicted me is that I'm a Mexican and he was a police officer. From there you call me a cold-blooded murderer. I didn't tie anybody to a stretcher. I didn't pump poison into anybody's veins from behind a locked door. You call this justice. I call this and your society a bunch of cold-blooded murderers." (Infamous last words)
This statement, and others like it, has raised morality questions which haunt politicians and citizens alike. When the state takes away one's life, how is this action more moral than the original crime? The government represents its people. When the government condones such morbid actions to be taken place legally, what message does this send out to its people? The answers to these questions can be seen in the statistics offered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This report offers the following facts:

· At the end of 1998, the US held 3,452 prisoners on death row, which is a 4% increase from 1997.

· On December 31, 1998, the youngest death row inmate was 18 years old and the eldest was 83. The average age was 38 years old.

· As of the end of 1998, the execution of prisoners 16 years old or younger was permissible in a dozen states. Eight of which did not specify a minimum age for which the death penalty could be imposed.

· 34 of the 38 capital punishment states use lethal injection. Electrocution is the sole execution method in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Nebraska.

Delaware, New Hampshire and the state of Washington permit hanging as a method of execution. Idaho, Oklahoma, and Utah authorize firing squads. (Capital Punishment 1998).
As seen, it is evident that the number of criminals placed on death row has increased; The requirements to be placed on death row has broadened; And many of the states still allow for cruel and painful methods execution. As a result of all this senseless killing, not one report was generated which affirms that capital punishment actually deters further crimes. In fact, the homicide rate in the United States is far higher then that of Canada's. (The death penalty 33 years later).
Fortunately, the Canadian government has remained steadfast on the issue of capital punishment. Despite public pressure, the Canadian government is determined to up hold its morals and civility. One may suggest that Canada's reasonably low homicide rate (which, by the way, is decreasing annually) can be credited to the "leading through example" policy the Canadian government is enacting. By not lowering itself to the murder's level, the Canadian government is able to effectively punish criminals while deterring similar crimes from happening in the future. Respect for the criminal justice system should not be commanded through fear, but earned through compassion.
As seen, capital punishment is a barbaric tool used for centuries to punish wrong doers. As society evolves, so does its beliefs. But many stare so long at the past they do not see the future. People must realize that society has come a long way and capital punishment is a step in the wrong direction. Capital punishment must remain in the past and not in the future.

Works Cited

Kenna, Kathleen. "Why America kills off killers." The Toronto Star. 13 December 1998. A3.

Kuntz, Tom. "Infamous last words." The Globe and Mail. 23 September 1994. A23.

Snell, Tracy. "Capital Punishment 1998." Bureau of Justice Statistics. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/cp98.pr. 6 May 2000.

"The death penalty 33 years later." The Toronto Star. 11 December 1995. A16.

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