Federation of World Peace and Love

Abolishing the Death Penalty – A Major Step Toward Fostering World Peace 

Todd W. Howeth

Attorney, Ventura, California

USA

Abolishing the death penalty in the United States would be a major step toward fostering world peace.  Although there is a trend among nations to ban capital punishment, the United States is still one of the only two remaining modern industrialized nations (Japan is the other) that retain capital punishment. By banning capital punishment the United States could join the majority of other modernized nations that have banned capital punishment as an acknowledgement that each life has dignity and that killing another is wrong, even when the act of killing is sanctioned by a State or Nation.   

As an attorney working as a public defender in Ventura County I have defended people charged with capital crimes and can attest to the fact that the death system is broken. 

Thirty one years after capital punishment was again legalized in California there have been more than 45,000 homicides in California but only thirteen executions. Currently there are 680 people on death row in California. Executions are twenty to thirty years after the crime and that length of time is growing.  Capital punishment is extremely costly:  It costs about one hundred and forty million dollars a year for courts, lawyers and the prison system to implement capital punishment.  In a review of 10 capital case trials, for example, it was determined, by one researcher that the cost to the tax payers to litigate a single capital case was between two to ten million dollars.  Ventura County, for example, where I work as a public defender, has spent 5.5 million dollars seeking executions since the Year 2000.  It has been estimated that this amount of money could have funded the salaries of twelve additional experienced high school teachers per year or eleven additional homicide investigators per year.  

It costs so much to litigate a capital case because no one wants to make the mistake of executing the wrong person.  This risk has been brought home to many, through the recent advances in DNA testing which has resulted in over one hundred and thirty people on death rows across the nation being declared innocent and freed.

To the extent that some nations still look to the United States as an example of freedom and democracy, banning capital punishment would send the message to other nations that killing and violence is not a way to solve problems or resolve conflict.  Such a message would go a long way toward ushering in a new period of world peace and non-violence.