The following is an op-ed submitted by senior Will Pattie. Want to share on opinion of your own? Send your op-ed to [email protected]

On Dec. 23 1991, Cameron Todd Willingham was found guilty of an act of arson that resulted in his three children being burned alive. He was forced to pay the ultimate price for his crime: death.

However, after his execution, there was widespread talk of a possible inaccuracy in the case. Dr Craig Beyler, along with numerous other experts in arson, was tasked to reinvestigate the evidence and determine whether arson had actually been committed. Beyler found that “a finding of arson could not be sustained” and that the evidence used against Cameron in trial was “hardly consistent with a scientific mind-set and is more characteristic of mystics or psychics.” A gross inaccuracy in the American legal system turned a tragedy with three deaths into a calamity with four.

Unfortunately, this is not just an anecdote, but a reflection of a larger problem with errors in our courts. A study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that an estimated 4.1% of death row victims are innocent, which suggests multiple people are wrongly sentenced to death by the United States Government annually. Some of these victims of injustice sit in prison for enough time until they are exonerated. Others like Cameron Todd Willingham are not so lucky and are forced to pay the ultimate price due to a miscarriage of justice.

This is just one of many horrifying issues within the system of capital punishment. On top of killing innocent people, the death penalty subjects victims to painful, torturous deaths, fails to deter crime, and allows the state to wield unnecessary power over the lives of individuals. This is why every European nation except Belarus has done away with it and why the United States should follow suit.

Even when the person executed is actually guilty, the process of capital punishment is far from the quick and painless process it’s promised to be. Since the turn of the 21st century, the electric chair has been phased out as the main method of execution in favor of a “more humane” method of killing: lethal injections. However, injections come with their own set of problems.

For one, doctors refuse to give lethal injections as it violates the first rule of the Hippocratic oath: “do no harm.” So who does administer them? Typically, it’s a prison employee who has had some training in venipuncture. Ideally, the process should take around 7 minutes and involves giving the patient sodium thiopental to put them to sleep, pancuronium bromide to relax their muscles, and then potassium chloride to kill them. Trusting amateurs with this difficult process, however, has proven unsuccessful in many cases.

Sometimes the sedative isn’t properly inserted, in which case, the victim suffers a painful death. Other times the vein is missed entirely. Take the case of Clayton Lockett. After struggling to find a vein for 51 minutes, the execution team decided to aim for the femoral vein in his groin. This quickly went awry when the vein “exploded” and “collapsed.” The team frantically tried to call off the execution, but it was too late. A full hour and forty-seven minutes after Lockett entered the death chamber, he was pronounced dead. This, and countless other mishaps, is the reason why lethal injections have the highest error rate of any form of execution, and why multiple recent death row inmates have begged for the electric chair, or even the firing squad, as their method of execution.

These episodic executions also take a mental toll on the prison guards who have to watch the process and administer the chemicals. Over a quarter of prison employees already suffer from depression, which is three times the average level in the US, and compounding that with the anxiety and guilt of being forced to execute prisoners has led to a mental health crisis that is seldom discussed.

On top of all of that, the process of capital punishment is ultimately wasteful, and we could actually save money by holding prisoners for life. Death row inmates are more likely to suffer from serious mental disorders such as PTSD, which adds to healthcare costs, and they require additional staff with specific training. The cost of injections has skyrocketed in the past few years too, as fewer and fewer companies are willing to produce them for ethical reasons. Put these factors together, and the United States has a prison system that spends $1.12 million more on a death row inmate than one in prison for life. This is money that would easily be saved if we simply stopped executing people.

Advocates of the death penalty like to suggest that if death is kept on the table as a potential punishment, psychopaths will think twice before they shoot up a public area. This would be a good argument if it wasn’t for one critical flaw: the evidence doesn’t support it. The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) evaluated the murder rates of several countries before and after abolition of the death penalty and concluded that murder rates continued to decline at normal levels. This, and countless other studies concluding the same thing, is the reason why the overwhelming majority of experts believe that the death penalty has no effect on crime. Mass murderers are power crazy, and hoping that capital punishment will cause them to think twice before opening fire into a crowd of people is unrealistic.

Now, are there people that have committed acts so heinous that they don’t deserve to live? Yes. The serial killers and mass murders of the world, people who have taken many lives, likely don’t deserve the right to life themselves.

But who should we trust to pick out these deplorables? To whom do we dole out this responsibility; the ability to look over the populace and exterminate anyone who fits their subjective sense of evil? Nobody should wield this power. Not you, not me, and certainly not the erroneous United States judicial system that kills innocent people, wastes resources, drives prison employees insane, and subjects capital punishment victims to torturous deaths.