Swift and Sure Punishment

Pain. Anger. Frustration. Hatred. These feeble words do not describe the anguish felt by the families of murder victims. Ted Bundy was responsible for the deaths of more than 50 young women across the United States (Lamar, 34). Bundy was finally sentenced to death by the state of Florida in 1978 for the kidnapping and brutal murder of a 12-year-old girl and the deaths of 2 Florida State sorority sisters (Lamar, 34). As if the loss of a loved one is not enough for a family to contend with, Bundy remained on death row for nearly 10 years. Three stays of execution and endless appeals kept Bundy alive for almost a decade, when his victims lives were untimely and viciously taken from them (Lamar, 34). If a sentence of death is handed down, then it should be enforced, not as a question of morality, but simply as an act of justice.

The moral issue of whether the death penalty is right or wrong and its constitutionality, is beyond this argument. The death penalty already exists in 36 states, and, given its existence, it should be enforced. Since the United States Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 36 States have legislated capital punishment statutes (Capital Punishment, 1992). All but 13 states and the District of Columbia have death as a sentencing option, including Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin (Norman, 1). Since capital punishment is already in existence, the problem is that it is not enforced. This lack of enforcement translates into inefficient functioning of the criminal justice system.

Two reasons why the death penalty should be enforced are saved time, by the court system through limited appeals, and saved money, by taxpayers due to reduced court and imprisonment fees. Much of the court's time could be saved if death row inmates were limited to a set number of appeals in a reasonable amount of time. Facilitating numerous appeals results in many unforeseen costs. In 1992, expenditures on criminal justice activities by all federal, state, and local governments combined reached $299 per capita (BJS). Ted Bundy's 10- year stay on death row, involving numerous 10-year appeals and excessive imprisonment fees, eventually cost the Florida state taxpayers more than $6 million dollars (Lamar, 34). These expenses are unnecessary and unjustifiable and could be alleviated by limiting appeals. In addition to this, public defense expenditures reached a startling $16.4 billion in 1990, which breaks down to about $7 per capita for each case tried in public defense costs alone (Capital Punishment, 1992). Although these figures are for total spending on public defense, it is easy to deduce that by limiting the number of appeals for death row inmates, these figures could be significantly reduced.

An automatic appeal has been instituted in 35 of the 36 death-penalty states in an effort to reduce the amount of time spent by the court's appeal system reevaluating capital cases (Capital Punishment, 1992). Mandatory appeals shorten the length of time spent on death row and therefore could not be considered cruel and unusual punishment, although some opponents of the death penalty argue that appeals themselves are a form of torture, as they keep inmates on death row for many years. This argument is contradictory because they also assert that there is a possibility of executing an innocent person. With no appeal, the chance of freeing a falsely convicted felon is also decreased. They cannot make this argument because arguing against mandatory appeals in that they bog down the system defeats the purpose of their argument against killing an innocent person. There must be a balance between these concepts two and to argue one side or the other is illogical. Though this logic may seem twisted, mandatory appeals expedite the execution process, which is currently an average of nine years and six months on death row before the sentence is carried out (Capital Punishment, 1992).

Use of the death penalty the way the law intended it to be used could actually reduce the number of violent murders by eliminating some of the repeat offenders. This would allow capital punishment to be used as a system of justice, not just a method of deterrence. Opponents of the