Capital Punishment is the punishment of execution, administered to someone legally convicted of a capital crime or better known as the death penalty. The law sees the death penalty as the ultimate deterrent of crime although there have been studies that prove that to be wrong. Our legal system feels that it is appropriate to not only restrict minorities of a fair trial when being sentenced to death row but to also pile fee on top of fee throughout the entire case running cost through the roof. One of the worst things that capital punishment has done is execute those who have been wrongfully convicted. Since 1662 when the first legal execution took place there have been people on either side of the capital punishment spectrum. Today there are many small and larger organizations that come together to protest the death penalty and their support is growing day by day. .
Steven N. Durlauf begins his article, "Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Understanding Disparate Results" by saying that "The effectiveness of capital punishment in deterring homicides, despite decades of empirical work, remains very unclear." Many in our judicial system feel that if they threaten people with the punishment of death that they will stop them from killing others. To someone in their right mind, the consequence of death would be enough to prevent murder but to those who have convinced themselves that murder is the right answer it isn't so clear. According to Durlauf there are four reasons why the studies done on deterrence are full of doubt and "the uncertainty about the determinants of an individual's choice of committing a murder or not" is one of the main reason studies are bad. Across the board of the many different experiments done to prove the death penalty is a good deterrent have results that vary tremendously. For those both for and against Capital Punishment, there are studies that have concluded with results that favor both sides of the argument.