Everyone has a right to their life. That should be a given. But in our country, there is a policy that brings an exception. Why have we decided it is acceptable to take someone’s life?

Rodney Reed, a black death row inmate who was convicted by an all-white jury for the murder of Stacey Stites in Bastrop, Texas, was sentenced to be killed by lethal injection on Nov. 20. However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals recently granted him an indefinite stay of execution, temporarily suspending the execution until an unspecified date. This case garnered a lot of attention because celebrities, such as Rihanna and Beyoncé, advocated against his execution, and new evidence has arisen that casts doubt on Reed being the true perpetrator. 

The root issue with the case lies in Reed’s death penalty sentence. The execution of persons as a punishment is incredibly unjust and is a critical issue not only in Rodney Reed’s case but also in other death penalties. Proponents of capital punishment claim that the death penalty targets the guilty, but in reality, no less than 4.1 percent of people sentenced to be killed in the justice system are innocent according to a study analyzing data from 1973 to 2004. This is extremely eye-opening, because any chance that innocent people have their life snatched away from them by this punishment is too much.

As with other aspects of the justice system, there is both a racial and a wealth gap in the death penalty’s application. Even in the juries for death penalty cases, black Americans are much less likely to be seated. This is especially devastating because black defendants are executed more often than their white counterparts. In fact, data from 2002 showed a startling comparison between 178 black defendants sentenced in cases with a white victim and only 12 white defendants sentenced in the reverse situation.

Another aspect of subjectiveness with the death penalty punishment is a person’s socioeconomic status. 95 percent of the people on death row in the US are economically disadvantaged. These underprivileged individuals are hurt the most by this cruel policy as they don’t have equal access to adequate resources such as defense to protect themselves. Their lawyers often don’t care about the case, show up intoxicated, or fall asleep during the trials.

The clear cruelty of this policy cannot be ignored. Some argue that because the methods used to carry out the death penalty, such as lethal injection, are painless, the penalty is acceptable. However, this has been proven completely wrong as well. Experts have likened the pain felt from death penalty punishments to resemble the feeling of “waterboarding” or “being buried alive while feeling fire in one’s veins.” Not to mention the other brutalities within the punishment, such as waiting on death row for years (usually for more than a decade), and botched executions. Given the inhumanity of the death penalty, we as a country should be extremely uncomfortable with what we are subjecting our fellow living beings to. 

The penalty is not even able to accomplish its intended purpose, which is to deter crime. A majority of experts agree that the death penalty doesn’t disincentivize murder. Instead, states without the death penalty have much fewer accounts of murder than those with capital punishment. This callous policy cannot accomplish what its strongest supporters would claim is its necessity for existence. So what reason is there at all to keep it at all? Instead of taking away someone’s chance at life, there are much better ways to make change. For example, the decriminalization of certain offenses and targeted policing approaches that pay attention to systemic issues are proven to be more effective.

The death penalty means snatching away someone’s right to life. We need to recognize the immensity of an action like that. There is nothing that gives us the right to kill. None of us are in a position to put ourselves above others and make decisions about their life, which is why there is no reason for the death penalty to stay. If this isn’t cruel and unusual punishment, what is?