Gannie Shekhar
Dr. Hurley
Honors English 10B
Febuary 19, 2014
Research Paper

The death penalty is a very controversial subject in our government. The people against capital punishment argue it’s not humane, it’s painful, it costs more than life in prison and certain groups are targeted more than others. The people who support capital punishment argue it is strong deterrence, it’s retribution and it’s moral. Death by execution has existed as a punishment since the dawn of time, yet although this has existed seemingly forever, the question of its morality has also existed for that same amount of time.

The most important subtopic of the death penalty is deterrence, the people for the death penalty argue “recent research shows that each execution carried out is correlated with about 74 fewer murders.”(Michael Summers) This means Many people’s greatest fear is death; therefore if they know that death is a possible consequence for their actions, they are less likely to perform such actions. “Throughout the 1990s, our society increased the number of executions, and the number of murders plummeted. Since 2001, there has been a decline in executions and an increase in murders.”(Michael Summers) Summers is saying that the death penalty is actually a strong deterrence, because the number of murders went down throughout the 1900’s when more executions were taking place. The con side argues “Persons contemplating murder do not sit around the kitchen table and say I won't commit this murder if I face the death penalty, but I will do it if the penalty is life without parole.”(H. Lee Sarokin) What Lee is trying to say is that the death penalty does not cause deterrence in future criminals. When committing a murder the killer doesn’t think of the