In his col­umn for TIME Magazine, bas­ket­ball hall of famer, author, and film­mak­er Kareem Abdul-Jabbar broad­ly explores the state of the death penal­ty In the United States and con­cludes that life with­out parole is the bet­ter option for American soci­ety. Stating that “[t]he pri­ma­ry pur­pose of the death penal­ty is to pro­tect the inno­cent,” Abdul-Jabar notes that there is a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between the death penal­ty’s goal in the­o­ry and its appli­ca­tion in prac­tice. ​“While it’s true that the death penal­ty may pro­tect us from the few indi­vid­u­als it does exe­cute,” he says, ​“it does not come with­out a sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial and social price tag that may put us all at an even greater risk.” Abdul-Jabbar points to the death penal­ty’s finan­cial cost, the risk of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent, and racial and eco­nom­ic dis­par­i­ties in its appli­ca­tion. Financially, he says, “[t]his isn’t a mat­ter of moral­i­ty ver­sus dol­lars. It’s about the moral­i­ty of sav­ing the most lives with what we have to spend. Money instead could be going to trau­ma cen­ters, hos­pi­tal per­son­nel, police, and fire­fight­ers, and education…The ques­tion every con­cerned tax­pay­er needs to ask is whether or not we should be spend­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars on exe­cut­ing pris­on­ers when life with­out parole keeps the pub­lic just as safe but at a frac­tion of the cost.” His col­umn dis­cuss­es the ​“high prob­a­bil­i­ty that we exe­cute inno­cent peo­ple,” cit­ing the more than 140 peo­ple exon­er­at­ed from death row and a recent study indi­cat­ing that 4% of peo­ple sen­tenced to death may be inno­cent. Abdul-Jabbar also describes racial bias in cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing, and the prob­lem of inad­e­quate rep­re­sen­ta­tion, say­ing, “[t]his lack of fair appli­ca­tion is why some oppo­nents of the death penal­ty con­sid­er it uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment.” He con­cludes, ​“we can’t let our pas­sion for revenge over­ride our com­mu­ni­ties’ best interest…With some­thing as irrev­o­ca­ble as death, we can’t have one sys­tem of jus­tice for the priv­i­leged few and anoth­er for the rest of the coun­try. That, more than any­thing, dimin­ish­es the sanc­ti­ty of human life.”

(K. Abdul-Jabbar, ​“Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Abolish the Death Penalty,” TIME, May 22, 2015.) See New Voices, Costs, Race, and Innocence.

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