The practice of capital punishment had been used for centuries and it is retained in United States since the Supreme Court reestablished it in 1977. Whether someone convicted of a capital crime receives a death sentence depends greatly on the state or county in which the trial and conviction takes place. In some states, a death sentence is rare. Southern states, particularly Texas (443 death row inmates in 1999), hand down significantly more death sentences than those in the rest of the country. California, the state with the largest penal system, had 513 inmates on death row in the spring of 1999. Such state-to-state disparities exist because some states do not have death penalty practice in their law systems, where some others have. Some states have abolished capital punishment while other states still retain it.

Supporters of capital punishment consider the practice as

Minorities are more likely to be charged the death penalty than whites. Further more, the data indicate that the race of the victim determines whether the prosecutor will ask for the death penalty. The accused murdered of a white person (especially a wealth white person) is several times more likely to get the death penalty than the accused murderer of Black, Native American or Hispanic American. Whether someone will die and someone will get life imprisonment, racism plays a big role in determining it. This shows that capital punishment is unfairly applied. It seems that capital punishment is only an appliance that makes more discriminations against minorities.

A study published in 1982 in the Stanford Law Review documents 350 capital convictions in which it was later proven that the convict had not committed the crime. Of those, 23 convicts were executed and others spent decades in prison. Later, in this few years, many people who have been condemned to death are proven not guilty because their DNA tests show that they are innocent, and also because of errors committed during the trial. If these people are executed before they are proven not guilty, that means their rights to live have been violated. They can be live longer if they are not condemned to death, if they are only put for some years in prison. Therefore until the abolishment of capital punishment is enacted, many innocent people will be put to death for crim

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