capital punishment
...'s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man." These verses are simply saying, murder is forbidden. Man-killing animals are to be killed and any person who murders another is to be killed. Killing a man is an offense against almighty God for man is made in God's image. There are those that state that capital punishment is unfair to people of other races, classes, or mental abilities. I say that these aspects are not an issue. Murder has no color, class, or IQ A murderer is a murderer. When a loved one is killed, I doubt anyone could take comfort in the fact that the perpetrator had a low IQ, was black instead of white, or poor instead of rich. Ernest van den Haag wrote: "If and when discrimination occurs it should be corrected. Not, however, by letting the guilty blacks escape the death penalty because guilty whites do, but by making sure that the guilty white offenders suffer it as the guilty blacks do. Discrimination must be abolished by abolishing discrimination - not by abolishing penalties. However, even if...this cannot be done, I do not see any good reason to let any guilty murderer escape his penalty. It does happen in the administration of criminal justice that one person gets away with murder and another is executed. Yet the fact that one gets away with it is no reason to let another one escape." Also, doesn't the fact that the death penalty is optional make it seem more prone to racial discrimination? It has been called racist since a prosecutor can seek a death sentence against an African-American for a capital crime but not a white person for the same offense. I never hear prisons called "racist" because they are mandatory for many crimes. If the death penalty were the same way, race would be a non-issue and the courts would be forced to concentrate only on the crime committed, as it should be. For capital punishment to be applied equally to every criminal, rich or poor, black or white, it must be mandatory for ALL capital cases. Tucker, the author of several books, including Vigilantes: The Backlash Against Crime in America claims that if the pace of executions were stepped up, more lives could be saved. Tucker's analysis of the trends in murder rates, using Justice Department figures, suggests that increasing the number of executions for murder is associated with a decline in the number of murders per 100,000 of population. Tucker says that with executions falling to very low levels in the 1960s and capital punishment being declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, the murder rate trended upward, reaching a new peak in 1979. The Supreme Court reversed its position on the death penalty in 1976, and the murder rate dropped significantly through 1985 when there were 25 executions. That was only a quarter of the 1951 total, when the population was 35 percent smaller and there were only a tenth as many homicides. America's bark was worse than its bite, and the decline in the homicide rate was reversed. It returned to the levels prevailing before the Supreme Court decided that hanging murderers was ...