I watch a lot of true crime television shows and documentaries as well as listen to podcasts about serial killers and murderers. One of the most fundamental things that I learned is that some people are not meant to live in our society, they bring nothing of value to it and destroy the fundamental principles of what makes us different than animals. Serial killers like Ted Bundy, Edmund Kemper, and Albert Fish are all examples of people who are too evil for this world and only caused devastation. I do still truly believe that monsters like them should not be allowed to exist, so initially I believed that the death penalty was the only just way to keep them away from the rest of us.

I always knew that the criminal justice system disproportionately convicted black and brown folks worse than white folks of the same crimes. I never really considered this when it came down to wrongfully convicted people of color in comparison to serial killers and pedophiles. Recently, Brandon Bernard was put to death for a crime he committed when he was 18 years old that resulted in the deaths of two youth ministry students. He was not the person who directly killed them, and when he went to jail, he was a model prisoner who turned his life around. So why is he dead and Edmund Kemper who raped and murdered half a dozen women sitting in a jail cell? Justice is not served with capital punishment, if anything, it is giving the government the power to murder black and brown men inside of a veiled system.

Brandon Bernard is not the only black man to be wrongfully put to death, Alfred Bourgeois was put to death on Friday after spending 16 years on death row for torturing and killing his two year old daughter. He was intellectually disabled, but the jury at his trial was not made aware of this because his lawyers never presented this information. He also was adamant that he did not do it, but that is true of many convicted criminals, so I guess the bigger issue is why is he dead and not Ed Kemper? Again, a white serial killer who tortured and murdered members of his own family is still sitting in Vacaville, CA, but an intellectually disabled man was lethally injected for a crime he may have not committed.

At what point do we stop and consider that the death penalty isn’t actually protected anyone? Also, we can talk about the financial cost of Death Row which is currently costing Californians $153 million per year and that cost is only climbing. We are willing to pay for people to die for crimes that they either did not commit or could have been imprisoned for life on, but we cannot afford to solve homelessness? We are in an economic depression and we are still paying millions, on a federal level, billions, to ensure that people die when we already have lost over 250,000+ lives to COVID… And don’t even get me started on the number of deaths in prisons are caused by COVID.

The entire system is failed, and Joe Biden has already promised to abolish the federal death penalty; he even has incentives for states to abolish their death penalties. But Trump’s administration has five more executions scheduled for his term, and you can do something about it. You can sign this petition to overturn the death penalty (The Action Network). You can also sign this petition by the ACLU to abolish federal death penalties. You can also read and sign individual petitions to stop the deaths of these prisoners (deathpenaltyaction.org).

I guess my point is, I changed my mind after realizing that too many people are dying for crimes that they did not commit or were not as severe as white criminals. In the last week, our government put to death a disabled man and a changed man, and they kept Ed Kemper alive. Serial killers and pedophiles shouldn’t be here, but the death penalty isn’t doing much to keep them at bay. The death penalty is an expensive and ineffective way to keep law and order, and the whole system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt, ASAP.