Most civilized nations consider the death penalty as a cruel and inhuman punishment. 106 countries worldwide have abolished it, and yet it is still commonly used in too many states including the United States of America. The US in fact is one of only six countries that apply capital punishment on convicts who have been under 18 when they committed their crime. Although the death penalty is a very controversial issue, according to the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Southern Mississippi, 70% of the Americans support execution as a punishment. No man on earth has the right to decide or rule about another person's life. The government has the duty to protect us from criminal individuals but exceeds its power by taking their lives.

There are five different methods in use today to execute people. The most common one is the lethal injection. The prisoner is secured to a gurney by wrist and ankle restraints. He gets three injections, which vary slightly from state to state. The first one causes unconsciousness, the second one stops respiration and the final one brings his heart to a halt. Another means of ex

Markman, Stephen. "Innocent people have not been executed." The Death Penalty: Opposing viewpoints. Ed.Paul Winters. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1997.

Death penalty supporters argue that executions cause hardly any physical pain and result in a fast death. This justifies accordingly capital punishment as humane and not cruel. Admitably there are only a few cases known that have led to a slow painful death. On December 14th 1988, already two minutes into the execution the syringe came out of Raymond Laundry's vein, spreading deadly chemicals across the room towards witnesses. It took the execution team fourteen minutes to reinsert the catheter in to the inmate's vein (Jenkins, page 92). Another case known occurred in Oklahoma on March 10th in 1992. Two minutes after the drugs were injected the muscles of Robyn Lee Parks began to react spasmodically to the serum. Parks started to gasp and violently gag until he died eleven minutes later.

are lethal gas, hanging and firing squad. When using gas, the prisoner is put into a hermetically sealed steel chamber. Two different gases flow into the chamber. The first one makes him unconscious and the second one causes his death usually within six to eight minutes. This method, used on the Jews in the Third Reich, is in use in only five states, Arizona, California, Wyoming, Maryland and Missouri. Hanging is the fastest method and causes almost instant death. The "drop" is based on the persons weight to deliver 1260 pounds of force to the neck. 1260 is divided by weight to come up with the height in feet for the drop. This is to assure neither beheading nor strangulation. For the firing squad there is reportedly no protocol to the procedure, but it involves a five-man team, one of who will use a blank bullet, so that none of them knows who was the real executioner.

Schabas, William A. The Death Penalty As Cruel Treatment and Torture. Boston: The University Press, 1950.

As you can see the South outnumbers all the other regions in executions by far. Texas, with 243, is the leading state and produced almost 50% of all the executions for the last 24 years. The northeast made only about 9%. If it is true that the death penalty discourages murder the homicide rate should be drastically lower in the southern states. According to this theory the northeast, where states such as Maine or Vermont don't even apply the death penalty, should rank fairly high in the homicide chart.

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