On July 23, 2014 Joseph R. Wood faced the ultimate penalty. After the Supreme Court found him guilty he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. After serving on death row, his final day arrived but when his time came instead of meeting a peaceful demise; Wood suffered for an hour and forty minutes. After almost two hours of pure agony and 640 gasps of air later, Wood was pronounced dead. The chemicals that the executioners had used were administered incorrectly and another botched execution was added to the United States record of immoral acts. After centuries of executing people who we feel no longer deserve their lives the United States has managed to rack up a total of 276 botched executions between the years 1890 and 2014. You would think that after all these years we would have finally gotten it right but even to this day we fail to carry out a procedure that seems to be quite important in our society. Woods execution resurfaced the long-running debate of whether or not the government should put people to death. Is it effective at deterring crime? Does it ensure that innocent people aren’t being killed? Is it accepted under the constitution? And most importantly is it morally acceptable to kill someone for killing? One thing that the United States has managed to do right is spend billions of taxpayers dollars executing criminals who could have served life sentences without parole for significantly less money. On average court cases without the death penalty cost $740,000, whereas cases with the death penalty cost around $1.26 million. That’s a significant amount of money that could be spent researching diseases or decreasing the mortality rate among people with terminal illnesses. California alone spent four billion dollars executing only 12 people between 1980 and 2012. Is all of that money worth removing a dozen people from earth that will never truly learn their lesson? I can vividly remember reading with my grandmother after supper upon her brown and yellow tacky futon which always had a smelly remembrance of what she cooked for dinner the past evening better than she could ever recall, when our reading was briefly interrupted by my grandfather storming into the room and flicking on the old television set that seemed to struggle every time it was given a command. The newscaster was providing the newest information on the exoneration of Ryan Matthew