Is the death penalty justice?

When I was I child and other kids hit me, I would retaliate because, it felt like the only way justice could be served was to do to them what he did to me. For this reason we have the death penalty. Is it really ethical to have a death penalty? Should it be up to the people to decide whether or not someone lives or dies, and is the death penalty even really effective at deterring crime? Over the years of all the people put on death row, how can we be sure all of them are guilty? Well there is a lot that goes into these cases to determine whether a defendant is guilty or not. In all cases there is a pretrial and a trial; The defendant can appeal and convince the higher court to order a new trial. There is a lot of preparation that goes into perusing the death penalty. In fact, it’s quite unusual for a judge to implement the death penalty at all.
“Imposition of the death penalty is extraordinarily rare. Since 1967, there has been one execution for every 1600 murders, or 0.06%. There have been approximately 560,000 murders and 358 executions from 1967-1996 ‘
(FBI's Uniform Crime Report & Bureau of Justice Statistics.) According to New York Times, states with the death penalty had 48 to 101 percent higher homicide rates than states without the death penalty. However, this is just a mere correlation, not causation. States that have higher homicide rates might find that harsh laws like the death penalty are a lot more necessary in their states. Also, bare in mind, that murdering a murderer prevents one from ever committing homicide ever again. From a murderers perspective, in dire situations, they are committing a crime out of sheer rage or while under the influence of drugs. Perhaps they might be committing another crime or acting in a state of panic. Under these circumstances, the criminal is probably not considering consequences or of the likelihood that his actions might result in the death penalty in the future. Therefore, in my opinion the death penalty may be a deterrent in the premeditation of a homicide but not in most cases. The simple fact is that terminating a murderer prevents him from killing in the future more effectively than life without parole. Another factor that seems prevalent in the topic of implementing the death penalty is racism. According to the U.S. Census of 2000, caucasian people account for 72.4 percent of the world’s population; they also have most of the wealth in America. Since crime has a direct correlation to poverty, the fact of the matter is that minorities commit the majority of the nation’s crimes and the white race makes up most of the victims. In my research I found that people think racism affects who gets the death penalty. A lot of sources stated that if the victim was white, the defendant was more likely to receive the death penalty. I have found that this is mainly because most of America’s population is white. Sources also stated the minorities are statistically more likely to receive the death penalty, but minorities commit most of America’s crimes. So maybe race doesn’t dictate weather the defendant gets