Byron J. Ricketts: Reasons to eliminate the death penalty

Here are three good reasons to eliminate the death penalty:

The first and most compelling reason is that the death penalty has not ever and will never be a deterrent to murder. The actual fact is that since 1900, approximately 7,000 men and women have been legally executed in the United States. This number includes George Stinney Jr., who was executed on April 24, 1944 in South Carolina at the age of 15, and includes 23 people who were found to be innocent, but not in time to save their lives. In 2024, there are approximately 2,230 men and women on death rows throughout the United States.

The second reason is that it is a fact that those states who have and administer the death penalty have more murders committed than those states that have abolished it, which further belies the notion that the death penalty deters murder. This reason tells us that we have a broken legal system, which many of our elected politicians choose to ignore.

The third reason is that there are many people who believe that justice would be better served by keeping murderers in prison for the rest of their lives — that it would be a more appropriate form of justice for the survivors of the loved ones taken from us by their killers. As a father of a murdered child, I am one of them.

Byron J. Ricketts

Wendell