think about the horrible crimes they committed, especially people who do not know that prison is worse than the death penalty when doing life without parole. What if it were you who were to be executed for a crime you didn't commit? To answer that question, you would have to consider which is more important to you, your personal safety, or the common good. Common decency and ethics demand that you place the common good far above your personal safety. Therefore, you are morally obligated to take that risk, because to do otherwise would be selfish of you, not to mention cowardly. If we as a people sacrifice the personal conveniences of using electricity and fire because of the lives they claimed by accidents, then the human race would have to go back to living in caves, like cavemen did, for the fear of taking risks for social benefits. Another way would be to stop driving cars because they cause a lot of automobile accidents. In other words, for every seven executions, one other prisoner on death row has been exonerated. If as expected, the number of convictions continues to rise, so too will the risk of wrongful convictions (Shapiro 22-24). Studies have shown that the murder rate in the United States has not gone down since the states were allowed to execute in 1976. In reality, the murder rate has increased. This is all because of the corruption that this punishment has behind it (Http:www.smu.edu/~deathpen/). Something else that needs to be taken into consideration is that it cost taxpayers almost three times the amount of money to keep them on death row than it does to hold them in prison for a lifetime (Williams 26). In this country, and anywhere else that uses the death penalty, there should be no doubt that it is an expensive, brutal, and ineffective deterrent to crime. Many people think that by killing a person we are saving the taxpayers money. In fact, holding a prisoner on death row is more expensive than...
