Capital Punishment: Proper Punishment or a Form of Revenge?

Capital Punishment: Proper Punishment or a Form of Revenge? The death penalty has been around forever, in every recorded civilization there has always been some form of capital punishment. The methods of carrying out the death penalty have changed throughout history, from the more brutal types of our ancestors such as stoning and crucifixion, to the so-called humane ways, like lethal injection or the gas chamber being used today. There are more countries that have abolished the death penalty than ones where it is still legal, and the United States is the only country in the Western Civilized World to continue using it today. The United States is one of the four countries that carry out the highest number of executions every year. The death penalty has not been proven to reduce the number of violent crimes, it is much more expensive to carry out an execution than to house an inmate for life and it is a final, irreversible sentence that has been proven in numerous occasions to have been carried out on innocent people. Studies on the deterrence factor of the death penalty have shown repeatedly that the death penalty has not had a diminishing factor on the number of violent crimes committed. When comparing the number of murders in states with or without the death penalty, it has been shown that there is no significant difference between the two, if anything states with higher executions have shown a higher number of murders. “One study by Thorsten Sellin found that between 1989 and 2002, California (one execution), Texas (239 executions) and New York (no executions) all had almost identical patterns of murder rates from year to year-—though overall, Texas’ average was highest.” ("Five reasons to," 2010)
Police chiefs around the country do not cosider the death penalty as the best tool in fighting crime, on the contrary, the chart below shows that when polled less than 1% of police chiefs considered the expanded use of death penalty a priority for

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