CCATDP supporter and Young Americans for Liberty’s Florida chairwoman, Brittany Turner penned an op-ed in response to an author’s call to execute James Holmes. The Central Florida Future ran the article, and Turner highlighted the death penalty’s many nagging issues including risk to life, high cost, failure to deter crime, and the harm it inflicts upon victims’ families. She wrote,
However, Holmes is severely mentally ill and schizophrenic. He does not have the ability to interpret reality normally. I believe it is highly immoral for anyone to suggest execution for mentally ill people who do not understand the consequences of their actions.
If Holmes had received death, his victims’ families would have been sentenced to decades, if not a lifetime, of enduring a long and tortuous appeals process and having to re-live that horrific experience over and over again. How is that justice?
She continued,
If the threat of capital punishment actually did act as a deterrent, and if it actually did make us safer by “protecting Americans,” there wouldn’t be such high murder and violent crime rates in the biggest death penalty states. Clearly, the death penalty is ineffective.
For Turner it boils down to being educated about capital punishment and choosing the option with the fewest risks. She stated,
It’s all about education. When people are educated about alternatives to the death penalty, such as life without possibility of parole, I think it makes people turn away from capital punishment. It means we don’t have to risk killing innocent people, we don’t have to make murder victims’ families suffer through a prolonged legal process and we don’t have to waste endless amounts of money for nothing in return.