On April 23, death row inmate Ronnie Gardner's decision to be executed by firing squad was accepted by state court Judge Robin Reese. As the first capital punishment execution in Utah since 1999, it has once more rekindled a decades-old debate: Should Utah remain a death penalty state?

Capital punishment continues to be used for a few reasons: It's believed to be a major crime deterrent and cheaper than life imprisonment in already overcrowded prisons, and the executions can be done humanely through lethal injection. However, based on recent findings, none of these reasons is valid.

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice made its annual report of crime rates across the country, including cities with the highest population. Cities in each of the 15 non-death-penalty states consistently had lower crime rates than cities within the 35 states that did have the death penalty. An example being New York City, without the death penalty, which had a total of 613 violent crimes compared to Philadelphia, which does have the death penalty and had a total of 1,475 violent crimes.

Similar reports done each year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that non-death-penalty states have had noticeably lower crime rates since 1991.

The death penalty being cheaper than life imprisonment without parole is also a myth. While the actual executions aren't comparatively costly, the wasteful and taxing years of extensive trials and appeals, accompanied with the price of keeping death row inmates in highly-guarded solitary confinement, begin to add up.

A 2008 report by The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice found that California's present system, housing more than 600 death-row inmates, would cost $90,000 per inmate, totaling $137 million per year in comparison to the $11.5 million cost of life imprisonment without parole for the same number.

Lethal injection as a humane method of execution has also been questioned. An in-depth study conducted by Amnesty International has discovered that lethal injection has as high a potential to cause suffering as any other previously banned method, such as hanging.

Lethal injection involves a three-drug process to anesthetize, paralyze and then enforce cardiac arrest upon an inmate through overdose of potassium chloride. However, if the anesthetic is applied incorrectly the inmate will not become fully unconscious, and if this happens he or she will experience extreme pain from the third drug, pain he can't express because the second step, a paralytic agent, doesn't allow him or her to speak or move to let on their distress.

More than a dozen lethal injection executions have been botched because of untrained personnel performing the procedures, causing what should be a 10- to 15-minute process taking up to an hour. A recent example from 2009 is Romell Broom, an inmate from Ohio whose execution was delayed for more than two hours due to lack of a suitable vein to administer the drugs.

Capital punishment, stripped of these three justifications, is only a means to immediate retribution. However, death-row inmates can be punished just as strictly through life without parole sentences that aren't unconstitutional, expensive or ineffective.

More than 90 countries across the globe have abolished the death penalty, including the entirety of Western Europe, and 15 states have followed their example. It may be time for Utah to do the same.

is a high school and college student attending West Jordan High and prose editor of the WJHS Literary Magazine.