It’s sad that many people, like the writer of the Feb. 5 letter to Peninsula Voices [“Death penalty”], support the barbaric, uncivilized death penalty.
In their 2009 report “Smart on Crime,” 500 randomly selected police chiefs said they do not believe the death penalty is a deterrent and ranked it last in their priorities for effective crime reduction.
In a 2009 survey, Michael L. Radelet, Ph.D., found that 88.2 percent of polled criminologists do not believe the death penalty is a deterrent.
As shown in the 2000 United Nations Surveys on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems and the 2008 worldwide murder rate chart at ChartsBin.com, the U.S. has a higher murder rate than countries without the death penalty (e.g., European Union, Canada, Japan).
The report “Smart on Crime” also concluded that since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, the U.S. has spent about $2.5 billion beyond the costs of incarceration for life in prison, showing it wastes taxpayer money.
According to the ACLU, hundreds of people have been released from death row after being found innocent, but some had been executed; racial bias pervades the death penalty, from jury selection through sentencing, and those with high-quality attorneys are less likely to get the death penalty.
David Tonkin,
Port Townsend