It
can be argued that public safety is served by killing such criminals. A
dead person has literally zero chance of harming anyone. An imprisoned
person can, in theory, escape and do more harm.
This is less clear-cut than the "justice" argument. People do escape prison, and sometimes they kill innocents while out. So if you execute terrible criminals you may kill innocents by mistake; but if you fail to execute them innocents may die anyway. Now we have an lives-to-lives comparison, if we can just dig up the statistics.
Per this (informal) source, less than 1% of prisoners escape, and most of those are people who walk away from minimum security work gangs, not murderers. Those numbers seem believable. We'll take that 1% number for now, being generous to the pro-execution argument.
Now, people sentenced to execution may still escape and kill people before they die. Time spent on death row varies, but the average is something like fifteen years, plenty of time to escape. The average age of prison admission in Florida is about 30, and while Florida is freakish in many ways, that's consistent with other numbers I'm seeing elsewhere. Let's also assume that a prisoner's average lifespan is about seventy-five years. So someone sentenced to die has about fifteen years to escape and kill again. Someone sentenced to life has about forty-five, or roughly three times that long.
This is less clear-cut than the "justice" argument. People do escape prison, and sometimes they kill innocents while out. So if you execute terrible criminals you may kill innocents by mistake; but if you fail to execute them innocents may die anyway. Now we have an lives-to-lives comparison, if we can just dig up the statistics.
Per this (informal) source, less than 1% of prisoners escape, and most of those are people who walk away from minimum security work gangs, not murderers. Those numbers seem believable. We'll take that 1% number for now, being generous to the pro-execution argument.
Now, people sentenced to execution may still escape and kill people before they die. Time spent on death row varies, but the average is something like fifteen years, plenty of time to escape. The average age of prison admission in Florida is about 30, and while Florida is freakish in many ways, that's consistent with other numbers I'm seeing elsewhere. Let's also assume that a prisoner's average lifespan is about seventy-five years. So someone sentenced to die has about fifteen years to escape and kill again. Someone sentenced to life has about forty-five, or roughly three times that long.
(We'll
simplify and assume that escapees are equally distributed by age,
meaning a 74-year-old is as likely to escape as a 35-year-old. We'll
also assume that an escaped 74-year-old who's spent his entire life in
jail and a 35-year-old recent convict are equally dangerous to the
general public. Again, we're being generous to the pro-execution argument.
Stranger things have happened.)
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are roughly 170,000 murderers in prison. Per Wikipedia, roughly 3,000 are sentenced to die, and about 160,000 are sentenced to life, so that's consistent with the BJS data.
Now let's pretend we didn't have the death penalty. In that scenario, those 3,000 are sentenced to life instead. We're supposing that 1% of those, or 30, will escape, which again is generous in the extreme. We'll also suppose that a third of those escapes take place in the first 15 years of imprisonment, meaning they would have happened even with the death penalty. So now we have roughly 20 additional escaped murderers who would not have escaped if we'd executed them on schedule. And let's just assume they all kill one person before being recaptured (again, generous, as most escapees are captured very rapidly). So the death penalty saves twenty innocent lives, by this argument.
Now let's go back to our 4% false conviction rate. That means that of that 3,000 sentenced to die, roughly 120 are innocent. Let me say that again, just to get the full horror across: our government is going to kill 120 innocent Americans, no more guilty than you or me. That could be you, your neighbor, your family. This is not abstract, these are actual people that are going to die for no reason, no different than the innocents killed by those escaped prisoners.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are roughly 170,000 murderers in prison. Per Wikipedia, roughly 3,000 are sentenced to die, and about 160,000 are sentenced to life, so that's consistent with the BJS data.
Now let's pretend we didn't have the death penalty. In that scenario, those 3,000 are sentenced to life instead. We're supposing that 1% of those, or 30, will escape, which again is generous in the extreme. We'll also suppose that a third of those escapes take place in the first 15 years of imprisonment, meaning they would have happened even with the death penalty. So now we have roughly 20 additional escaped murderers who would not have escaped if we'd executed them on schedule. And let's just assume they all kill one person before being recaptured (again, generous, as most escapees are captured very rapidly). So the death penalty saves twenty innocent lives, by this argument.
Now let's go back to our 4% false conviction rate. That means that of that 3,000 sentenced to die, roughly 120 are innocent. Let me say that again, just to get the full horror across: our government is going to kill 120 innocent Americans, no more guilty than you or me. That could be you, your neighbor, your family. This is not abstract, these are actual people that are going to die for no reason, no different than the innocents killed by those escaped prisoners.
Keep
the death penalty and 120 innocent people die. Even assuming the
wrongful execution rate is 1% instead of 4%, that's still 30 innocent
deaths.
Eliminate the death penalty and 20 innocent people die, being extremely generous.
For more realistic estimates of escape rates and the number of murders
committed by escaped prisoners, a better number is more like two.
I
don't see any way to massage these numbers to give a different result.
Even being orders of magnitude more generous to the death penalty
argument than is reasonable, the math doesn't work out. As long as our wrongful execution rate is higher than 1% and our escape-and-murder rate
is less than 1%, the death penalty kills more innocent people than it
saves. And the real numbers are a hundred times worse than that.
When evaluated with real-world data, the public safety argument works against the death penalty.
When evaluated with real-world data, the public safety argument works against the death penalty.
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