In the summer of 2012, a man shot his wife then attempted to kill himself. During the summer of 2015, after an armed robbery at the Walmart on Emerson Avenue, the robber ran into a Vietnamese restaurant and shot himself in the head. After killing his niece and great nephew in Zionsville in February 2016, a man hid away in a hotel room downtown and killed himself. These are all crimes that ended in suicide, which is what the criminals quite possibly preferred. They would rather be dead and not have to face punishment than live with what they did.

I bring these crimes and suicides up because I’ve recently decided that I strongly disagree with capital punishment (execution). You may be wondering why I would want such awful people to still be able to live and get the chance to see the light of day again. The reason is because, as shown in the cases mentioned earlier, the criminals wanted to die. They chose to kill themselves because they knew life after they were caught wouldn’t be bright. If we punish them by killing them, we are just giving them what they want which is not much of a punishment at all.

I believe that those who have committed such horrid crimes should have to live with what they did and be miserable in prison with no chance of parole. I think that this is harsher than death, to be quite honest. Although most people probably don’t like to have their death planned out, those that are cowards would most likely prefer to have their life be put to an end than have to pay the price for the grief they caused others and for what they did.

Not to mention, capital punishment is more expensive than keeping someone alive. It costs an average of $740,000 for cases that don’t lead to death row, but about $1.26 million to execute someone. Maintaining each death row costs taxpayers about $90,000 more per year than for a prisoner in general population according to deathpenaltyinfo.org.

Another thing that makes execution the wrong choice is many of the lethal injections that states use have been pulled from the sale to prisons because they don’t want their products being involved in the execution of prisoners. Not having the proper tools for an execution can sometimes lead to a torturous death. They don’t want their products to be affiliated with execution because they find it inhumane, according to Stephanie Pappas from livescience.com. I honestly don’t blame them. As important as consequences are to criminals, how does the execution of a killer change their wrong doing? It doesn’t bring back the victim, and it probably doesn’t bring vengeance. It does nothing but make the executors just as bad as the killers. As said in the novel In Cold Blood, about one of the main characters who was being put through the capital punishment, “It doesn’t deter crime, but merely cheapens human life.”