Reddit reviews Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain

I'm reposting a comment I made below, because voting YES on 62 and NO on 66 is incredibly important to me. You should also know that if they both pass, the prop with the most YES votes becomes law.

It really just makes sense to get rid of capital punishment and I really feel like there's an angle that works for everybody.

1. For me, the most important reason why I think we should abolish the death penalty is that we have executed innocent people. 156 people have been exonerated from death row since the 70s. Here is a searchable list. We will never know exactly how many innocent people we've put to death, but we do know of some (like Cameron Todd Willingham, Carlos DeLuna, and Troy Davis). We should not be taking lives into our own hands with an accuracy rate of less than 100%, because death is a bell you can't unring.
   
   
2. The death penalty is expensive. In California, we have spent $308 million dollars per execution since it was reinstated in the 1970s.
   
   
3. Multiple studies have shown that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent. That justification for it is now out the window.
   
   
4. This could probably be a post of its own, but the death penalty is racist. A study showed (and more have backed it up) that a black defendant is four times more likely to be condemned to death than a white defendant when the "degree of severity" of the crimes are the same. That is, equally "grisly" murders. The race of the victim also matters--as of October 2002, 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims.
   
   
5. People from a lower socioeconomic status are more likely to be sentenced to death. Many defendants who receive the death penalty are represented by a likely overworked public defender, and a study at Columbia University found that 68% of all death penalty cases were reversed on appeal, with inadequate defense as one of the main reasons requiring reversal.
   
   
6. The appeals process and execution is a source of continued pain for the families of victims. They feel that they can't move on from their loss because they are continually dragged back into court, and forced to relive their trauma. Many family members have spoken out against capital punishment, and a collection of their stories is published here, Dignity Denied: The Experience of Murder Victim Family Members Who Oppose the Death Penalty. So, now the death penalty is hurting innocent people, and we can no longer use "justice for the families" as a justification.
   
   
7. Wardens, executioners, COs, and prison chaplains have all reported suffering from PTSD from being forced to participate in state-sanctioned murder. Their stories have been chronicled in books such as Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain and Death At Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner. Now, even more innocent people are being harmed by this practice. No civilians job should include killing another person.
   
   In summary, death sentences are handed out in an unjust manner, often without guilt being proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. The condemned then sit on death row for decades. They move through the appeals process, which costs the state hundreds of millions of dollars, and is traumatic for the victims' families. It takes an average of three appeals to have a conviction overturned--how many innocents fall through the cracks? Everyone involved in the process of finally "flipping the switch" is at risk for mental distress. And sometimes we fuck up in a huge way, and take an innocent life.
   
   So who exactly are we still doing this for, if it's not a deterrent, and the families don't want it? Are we just some angry crowd out for blood and revenge? I can't think of a single way in which capital punishment is not an abysmal failure, and we can do better.