His pain isn’t an excuse. Ours is.

In the United States, death row is not filled with monsters. It is filled with broken, abandoned, and traumatized human beings. And the numbers are impossible to ignore.

Over 90 percent of individuals sentenced to death endured severe physical or psychological abuse as children. Nearly 80 percent grew up in homes torn apart by domestic violence. For more than half of them, exposure to drugs or alcohol started before they turned twelve. Addiction was never a choice. It was part of their childhood.

Around 43 percent suffered traumatic brain injuries before adulthood. Over 70 percent live with serious mental illness, often rooted in their teenage years or earlier.

These are not isolated cases. They are not exceptions. This is the pattern. A pattern of pain, violence, and neglect that shapes lives long before the justice system ever notices them.

As children, they were invisible. As adults, they became criminals. And now, they are paraded in front of the world, stripped of their humanity, before the State quietly ends their lives.

Society loves to point fingers. It is always easy to blame the criminal. Much harder to face what created him. People love to say his past does not matter. They repeat it like a defense mechanism. “Plenty of people have hard lives and they do not become killers.” Convenient. Clean. Comfortable.

But the truth is filthier than that. You are not talking about hardship. You are talking about being beaten, raped, starved, abandoned. You are talking about growing up in chaos so constant that survival becomes a daily fight. A child like that does not become a healthy adult. He becomes what you allowed him to become.

Still, when that broken child turns into a broken man, when the violence explodes in ways even he cannot control, you pretend it came out of nowhere. You erase the years of abuse. You ignore the cries for help. And when it is finally too late, you act outraged. You shout for justice. And by justice, you mean death.

AI Generated – Dall-E

Every year, American states spend staggering amounts of money to maintain the death penalty. In Florida alone, it costs taxpayers around 51 million dollars annually to uphold capital punishment. California spends close to 184 million dollars every single year just to cover the extra expenses of death penalty trials, endless appeals, and death row incarceration. In Texas, each death penalty case costs about 3.8 million dollars. That is nearly 3 times the cost of keeping someone in prison for life. An estimated total annual cost of between 870 million and 1.24 billion dollars for the country.

Meanwhile, federal funding for child abuse prevention barely exceeds 789 million dollars a year for the entire country. Only 10% of the Mental Health Block Grant is reserved for children with serious emotional disturbances (SED). Programs meant to protect vulnerable children and support their mental health receive only a fraction of what is spent executing broken adults.

The message is clear. You choose punishment over prevention. You invest more in death than in protection. You refuse to help the child, then you pay to kill the adult. And still, you dare call that justice.

And yes, I can already hear the usual argument. “If we executed people faster, it would cost less.” That sounds simple. It is not. The reality is, speeding up executions does not save money. It never has. What drains public funds is not the time people spend in prison. It is everything that surrounds a death penalty case.

The moment someone faces a capital charge, the costs explode. Death penalty trials are longer and more complex. Jury selection alone can take weeks. Defense lawyers, expert witnesses, psychiatric evaluations, forensic tests. None of that disappears because you rush an execution. It only gets worse.

Then come the appeals. Automatic appeals, state-level reviews, federal courts, habeas petitions. Even if you try to limit them, they are built into the system to supposedly avoid wrongful executions. Skipping steps means more risk, not less expense.

Finally, the executions themselves are far from cheap. The drugs used for lethal injections cost tens of thousands of dollars per execution, when they are even available. Security is heightened for weeks. Extra staff, medical teams, last-minute legal battles. All of it costs money.

The truth is simple. Keeping someone in prison costs far less than killing them. It is not about time. It is about process. And you cannot cut corners on due process without cutting into justice itself.

So here is the question no one ever wants to answer. You say that pain is not an excuse. You say that childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, none of that gives a broken adult the right to kill.

Fine. But then explain this. Why does your pain give you that right?

You call it justice. You call it closure. But let us be honest. It is pain. It is anger. It is grief, dressed up in courtroom language.

If a wounded, abandoned child grows into a dangerous adult, you say his suffering does not excuse murder. So how does your suffering excuse execution? How does your heartbreak justify state-sanctioned death?

You cannot have it both ways. Either pain drives violence, or it does not. Either we rise above it, or we drown in it together.

The truth is, you want to believe your pain is different. You want to believe your rage is noble. Your anger is pure. Your revenge is justice.

But pain is pain. It does not transform into morality when the State carries the syringe. It does not become righteousness when it is wrapped in legal procedure. It stays exactly what it is. Grief. Fury. The human instinct to hurt back.

And you dress it up. You build courtrooms around it. You file papers. You speak of responsibility, accountability, punishment. But deep down, it is the same raw emotion you condemned in him.

You say his pain does not excuse murder. You say his trauma does not give him the right to destroy life. But your pain? That is different. Your pain is a free pass. Your grief is a license to kill.

It is not justice. It is hypocrisy with a badge and a budget. It is violence, sanitized, institutionalized, and sold to the public as fairness.

His pain is not an excuse. Yours is.

And let us stop pretending this has anything to do with justice. It has never been about justice. It is about money. Power. Corruption. The prison industry in America is a monster worth over eighty billion dollars a year. Every broken child, every abandoned teenager, every adult left to rot feeds the beast.

You think they want to prevent crime? You are dreaming. Crime is their business. Pain is their currency. Every dollar that should have protected a child ends up buying razor wire and execution drugs. Every budget cut to mental health becomes profit for private prisons. The more you suffer, the more they earn.

And here is what no one tells you. Every time the State kills, it does not just murder the condemned. It murders every victim the system could have saved and chose to ignore. It murders every child beaten to death because prevention was too expensive. Every woman raped and killed because mental health was not profitable. Every family destroyed while the machine stuffed itself with blood money.

You did not prevent crime. You invested in it. You let them fall. You let them die. You called it justice, but it was greed. You called it protection, but it was slaughter. You built your comfort on corpses.

Do not talk to me about morality. Do not talk to me about justice. You left the innocent to bleed so you could profit off the guilty. You did not just kill them. You killed the ones you were supposed to protect.

And now you stand there. Covered in blood. Drenched in the consequences of your cowardice. You look at the corpses your system created. You look at the families you destroyed. And still, you have the audacity to call yourselves civilized.