“Why are they doing this? What will it fix? What sense does it make?”
These are the words of Stan Allridge, brother of Ronnie Allridge who was executed in 1995. Allridge was just one of 1,585 inmates executed since the re-establishment of the U.S death penalty in 1976. Also among those 1,585 inmates was Kelsey Patterson, a Schizophrenic who despite being diagnosed with the disease, was still put on death row and executed in 2004.
Though the use of capital punishment is ultimately a decision left to the states, federally, it is still legal. However, capital punishment should be completely abolished because it is ineffective, unfair to the mentally ill, and an inhumane form of punishment.
Many Americans believe that if the U.S. were to completely ban capital punishment, the crime rates would skyrocket. That is logical in theory. If you get rid of a form of punishment, it would make sense that crime would increase. However, the death penalty is actually not as effective as you would think.
Virginia, one of 23 states that has gotten rid of the death penalty, had a murder count of 606 in 2021. And Texas, one of 27 states that still has the death penalty, had a murder count of 2,391 in 2021. Even accounting for Texas’ larger population, its murder rate per capita is higher than Virginia’s. This trend is true across many of the states. In other words, the murder rates in states with the death penalty is significantly higher than the murder rates of states without it.
So if the murder rates in death penalty states continue to remain higher than those in non-death penalty states, is the death penalty actually working?
These results continued to be true for Texas in 2023, when their murder count was on the rise even though they had an increase of executions.
Aside from the numbers and logistics of the death penalty’s effectiveness, there is also another major issue with the punishment, and that issue is its tendency to execute mentally ill inmates. The “mentally ill” card is often viewed as an excuse for inmates to get away with the crimes they committed, but psychologists claim that mental illness can have such a damaging effect on the brain, that a person may not even be fully aware of the crime they committed.
Evidence has shown that two in every five people executed between the years 2000 and 2015 suffered from a severe mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. However, to understand why this is such an issue, we must understand how mental illness can affect the brain and its thought process.
Schizophrenia, for example, is a chronic brain disorder that can cause delusions/hallucinations and disorganized speech and thinking. Bipolar 1 causes people to have extreme highs (feeling on top of the world) and extreme lows (participating in risky/unsafe behaviors). The extreme lows are where the dangerous, and possibly violent acts happen.
Cecil Clayton was one of the many inmates suffering with schizophrenia and other mental disorders who was executed. Clayton was missing 20% of his frontal lobe (the part of the brain responsible for rational decision making) due to an accident that occurred back in the 1970s. He suffered continuously from homicidal and suicidal thoughts and tendencies prior to his murder of Sheriff Christopher Castetter.
Multiple psychiatrists said he was not mentally fit for execution, but the courts ignored those evaluations, denied him a competency hearing, and ultimately executed him on March 17th, 2015.
Yet despite how awful it may seem that a man with the approximate IQ of a third grader was executed, the inhumane nature of the U.S capital punishment system gets far worse. The primary execution method in the U.S is death by lethal injection with a total of approximately 1,404 deaths since 1976. The lethal injection process involves three different drugs: Midazolam (anesthetic), Bromide (to paralyze), and Potassium Chloride (to stop the heart).
The process should take no more than about five minutes, which on paper seems reasonably “humane” to most death penalty supporters. The inmate goes into cardiac arrest shortly after going unconscious due to the first injection and dies relatively quickly without feeling a thing.
But recently, many states have found it both more difficult and more expensive to get the drugs needed to perform lethal injections, so they have turned to a new method. On January 25, 2024, Kenneth Smith was the first inmate in U.S. history to be killed using Alabama’s newest method of execution: nitrogen hypoxia.
Though many professionals claimed that this method would “cause unconsciousness in seconds, and cause death within minutes”, this proved to be untrue when Smith wasn’t pronounced dead until 8:25 pm at an execution that started at 7:53 pm.
Witnesses all claim that this execution style could classify as cruel and inhumane, as well as ineffective, yet as of right now, Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma have already approved this method. But as long as the death penalty is legal, who’s to say more states won’t also hop on the bandwagon of accepting inhumane methods of execution?
Among the long list of failures of the U.S. justice system, continuing to allow states to carry out the legal execution of inmates remains close to the top of that list. If the death penalty is not reducing crime rates, maybe it’s time that an alternative punishment is put in place.
If mental illness can become so debilitating that it can cause one person to kill another, maybe the solution is not another death, but medical help. If the methods of execution are beginning to push the boundaries of being tortuous and inhumane, maybe those methods should be reassessed.
If people are unable to administer justice effectively in the form of execution, then maybe that responsibility should not be left up to them. And if all of these things are true, maybe the death penalty shouldn’t remain at all.
