Putting to death people who have been judge to have committed certain extremely heinous crimes is a practice of ancient standing. But in the UnitedStates, in the latter half of the twentieth century, it has become a verycontroversial issue. Changing views on this difficult issue led the SupremeCourt to abolish capital punishment in 1972 but later turned to uphold it againin 1977, with certain conditions. Indeed, restoring capital punishment is thewill of the people, yet many voices have been raised against it. Heated publicdebate have centered on questions of deterrence, public safety, sentencingequality, and the execution of innocents, among others.One argument states that the death penalty does not deter murder. Dismissing capital punishment on that basis would require us to eliminate allprisons as well because they do not seem to be any more effective in thedeterrence of crime. Others say that states which have the death penaltyhave higher crime rates than those that do not. And that a more severpunishment only inspires more sever crimes. But every state in the union isdifferent. These differences include population, the number of cities, and thecrime rate. Urbanized states are more likely to have higher crime rates thanstates that are more rural. The state that have capital punishment have itbecause of their high crime rate, not the other way around. In 1985, a study was published by economist Stephen K. Layson, at theUniversity of North Carolina, that showed that every execution of a murdererdeters, on average of 18 murders. The study also showed that raising thenumber of death sentences by only one percent would prevent 105 murders. However, only 38 percent of all murder cases result in a death sentence, andof those, only 0.1 percent are actually executed.During the temporary suspension on capital punishment from 1972 - 1976, researchers gathered murder statistics across the country. Researcher Karl Spence o...
