For many years, capital punishment has been in use, but it is not been effective. Theodore Robert Bundy in 1978, slipped into a Tallahassee sorority house and bludgeoned two sleeping women to death, then killed a 12-year-old girl in Lake City. He was sentenced to three concurrent death sentences in 1979. Nine years later, Bundy is alive and well on the Death Row (Von Drehle 1A). A prisoner sentenced to death spends an average of 10 years, nationally, on death row waiting for their execution. More than 2,100 people live on America's death Rows. At the current execution rate, it would take eighty-two years to kill them all. Death Row is going to get bigger, the wait for execution is sure to get longer, and the cost is bound to get higher. At this rate, it seems that capital punishment will never become a reasonable or efficient means of controlling violent crime.

Charles Proffitt murdered Joel Medgebow by stabbing a bread knife into Joel's chest while he was sleeping, an act well determined to be premeditated in the case's court sessions. Three years after the crime was committed, using Profitt vs. Florida as its test case, the US Supreme Court officially gave its support to F

Capital punishment lowers the value of human life as seen by the general population. Many convicted murderers are found innocent in appellate cases, and have been pardoned, often times many years after having been initially convicted and sentenced to death. "In 1987, the Stanford Law Review published a study. They found substantial evidence which suggested that at least 350 people between 1900 and 1985 in America might have been innocent of the crime for which they were convicted, and could have been sentenced to death" ("Capital punishment in the United States").

lorida's death penalty. "Profitt could be dead in six months", said Attorney General Robert Shevin (von Drehle 1A). Today, 15 years after his heinous crime, Charles is still alive and well, and living off of the money paid by Florida state tax payers, as should be well noted. He is sewing uniforms at the Florida's state prison. The Supreme Court commuted his sentence last year to life in prison. The state of Florida spent five hundred thousand dollars in one decade to bring Proffitt to justice and half of that was spent to send Proffitt to the his death in the electric chair.

Capital Punishment does not deter offenders. Governments that promote the death penalty as the answer to violent crimes continue to have higher murder and violent crime rates than those which do not use the death penalty and rather use other methods to penalize its convicted criminals. The five countries with the highest homicide rates that do not impose the death penalty average 21.6 murders per every one hundred thousand people, whereas the five countries with the highest homicide rate that do have the death penalty average 41.6 murders per every one-hundred thousand people. The average murder rate per one hundred thousand people in the United States, with capital punishment as the penalty for a conviction thereof, is about 8 percent, while only 4.4 percent in non-capital punishment states. More than two thousand people live in American's Death Rows, all of them being supported in every meal, every shower, and every night's sleep by tax paying citizens. At the current execution rate, it would take eighty-two years to kill them all, along the course of which many would die naturally anyway. "The number on prisoners on death rows at the end of 1997 was three thousand three hundred thirty-five.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Capital Punishment, Progress Report, Supreme Court, Howard Douglas, Death Row, Death Rows, Von Drehle, Judiciary Committee, Robert Shevin, Joel Medgebow, death penalty, capital punishment, death row, hundred thousand, thousand people, life prison, death rows, sentenced death, von drehle 1a, tax paying, death sentences, hundred thousand dollars, death penalty average, current execution rate, hundred thousand people,
Approximate Word count = 1593
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)