Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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Thirty states, including Nevada, allow the death penalty despite it being an outdated abuse of force and waste of taxpayer dollars. Both liberals and conservatives should embrace abolishing it — liberals because it is cruel and unusual, conservatives because the state shouldn’t have the power to kill its citizens.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, since 1973, over 150 people have been released from death rows in 26 states because they were innocent. Nationally, at least one is exonerated for every 10 who are executed. The death penalty is also one of the least effective crime-curbing factors still used. It does not deter someone from committing a crime; it just brutally punishes after the fact.
The death penalty produces racist outcomes and is, therefore, a racist policy. The ACLU says, “Approximately 35% of those executed since 1976 have been Black, even though Blacks constitute only 12% of the population. The odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times higher if the defendant is Black than if he or she is white.”
Murder is abhorrent but state-sanctioned killing is not the answer. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Darkness is the crime; light is a sentence handed down by reason rather than rage. If we want to become the country we aspire to be, we must appeal to, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the better angels of our nature.”
