Many of the arguments against the death penalty rest on challenges to the way that it is currently administered. These arguments are not really against the death penalty, but rather against other features in the criminal justice system, such as the way that defense counsel are appointed or the way juries decide criminal cases. Whatever one thinks about these other issues, they shed little light on capital punishment. More generally, it is not unjust to impose the death penalty on a murderer who deserves it simply because another murderer has escaped justice. Some murderers who deserve to be executed will never be caught, still others will never be convicted, and others will escape with a lesser penalty. The fact that these murderers fortuitously escape the death penalty, however, does not alter the justice of imposing it on other murderers who deserve it.

Racial Bias

Occasionally the charge is made that the death penalty is administered in a racially biased fashion. But the empirical evidence does not reveal any discrimination against black defendants facing the death penalty. The Bureau of Justice Statistics in 1984 compiled the relevant data on the performance of the criminal justice system. About 48 percent of all murderers were black, but about 42 percent of those sentenced to death were black. In other words, a lower percentage of black murderers receive the death penalty than white murderers. The reason for this difference is that in general, homicides by white murderers are slightly more aggravated than those by black murderers. This data is strong evidence that the nation's tragic history of discrimination against blacks in the criminal justice system has no relevance to the current administration of capital punishment.

Recognizing that the data fail to support a Claim that black murderers are more likely to be executed, opponents of the death penalty have recently shifted to the claim that those who murder whites are more likely to be executed than those who murder blacks. At first glance, this might be viewed as an argument for expanding capital punishment to ensure that black victims receive justice no less than white victims. But in any event, this purported effect of the race of the victim disappears when the relevant circumstances of individual murders are considered. Many black-on-black murders are committed during altercations between persons known to each other, circumstances not typically thought to warrant a death sentence. On the other hand, black-on-white murders (and to a lesser extent, white-on-white murders) are more often committed during the course of robberies or other serious felonies, circumstances often prompting a capital sentence. In a careful analysis of the alleged effect of the race of the victim, a federal district court in Georgia found that racial effects disappeared when variables controlling for such relevant factors were added in.

Risk to the Innocent

Sometimes the claim is made that the possibility of executing an innocent person requires the abolition of the death penalty. This claim gives excessive weight to what is a minute risk in maintaining capital punishment while ignoring the much larger and countervailing risks in abolishing capital punishment.

The risk that an innocent person might be executed is minuscule. Our contemporary system of capital punishment contains an extraordinary array of safeguards to protect innocent defendants, including in many jurisdictions appointment of specially qualified counsel at the trial level and multiple appeals through both the state and federal courts. Before any sentence is carried out, the governor of the state typically will carefully examine the case to make sure that the murderer deserves a death penalty. In light of all of these safeguards, it would be extraordinary if an innocent person were to be executed. And, indeed, there is no credible, documented case of an innocent person being executed in this country for at least the last 50 years.

While no innocent person has been shown to have died in recent memory as a result of capital punishment, innocent people have died because of our failure to carry out capital sentences. In a number of documented cases, murderers have been sentenced to death only to escape these sentences in one way or another. Some of these murderers have gone on to kill again.

The horrific case of Kenneth McDuff starkly illustrates this. Sentenced to death for two 1966 murders, he narrowly escaped execution three times before his death sentence was commuted to a prison sentence in 1972. Ultimately released in 1989, McDuff proceeded to rape, torture, and murder at least nine women, and probably many more. After the television show Amenca's Most Wanted aired a program about him, McDuff was arrested in 1992, convicted, and given two death sentences. Based on cases such as McDuff's, it is quite clear that innocent people are more at risk from a criminal justice system that fails to carry out death penalties than from one that employs them.

The death penalty is vital to carrying out the mission of the criminal justice system. It is just punishment for the deliberate taking of innocent human life. It prevents some murders through its deterrent effect and prevents other murders by permanently incapacitating the most dangerous killers. It is therefore no surprise that capital punishment receives such broad support in the United States.

About the author: Paul G. Cassell is a professor of law at the University of Utah College of Law in Salt Lake City, where he teaches criminal procedure, victims' rights, and related subjects. He served as a law clerk on the Supreme Court of the United States to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and as both an associate deputy attorney general and an assistant United States attorney in the Department of Justice. He has testified several times before Congress on issues relating to the death penalty.

1. Study the vocabulary:

· aggravated murders - убийство при отягчающих обстоятельствах

· deterrence is the prevention of something, especially war or crime, by having something such as weapons or punishment to use as a threat. удержание (от враждебных или преступных действий при помощи устрашения) nuclear deterrence — ядерное сдерживание Is capital punishment a deterrent to crime ? — Является ли смертная казнь эффективным средством устрашения преступников?

· incapacitation - потеря трудоспособности; становление неспособным, становление несостоятельным, становление непригодным, incapacitate - deprive (someone) of their legal capacity

· inviolability - [ɪnvaɪələ'bɪlətɪ] 1) нерушимость, непоколебимость 2) неприкосновенность - inviolability of borders - inviolability of frontiers - inviolability of person - personal inviolability

· jury - a body of people (typically twelve in number) sworn to give a verdict in a legal case on the basis of evidence submitted to them in court the jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts

· a judge - a public officer appointed to decide cases in a law court

· heinous - ['heɪnəs, 'hinəs] (of a person or wrongful act, especially a crime) utterly odious or wicked a battery of heinous crimes

· the murder for hire

· parole - the temporary or permanent release of a prisoner before the expiry of a sentence, on the promise of good behaviour he committed a burglary while on parole