"One death is a tragedy a million deaths is a statistic"- Josef Stalin. Today in the United States it is hard to mourn the loss of one when hundreds are killed annually, but what gives someone the right to take another life? The death penalty is what. The death penalty is the murder of a person annexed by law or judicial decision to the commission of a crime (Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary). .
The death penalty gives society the unmistakable message that human life no longer deserves respect when it is useful to take it and that homicide is legitimate when deemed justified by the concerns of society. Reliance on the death penalty obscures the true causes of crime and distracts attention from the social measures that effectively contribute to its control. Politicians who preach the desirability of executions as a weapon of crime control deceive the public and mask their own failure to support anti-crime measures that will really work because over 94% of criminal justice dollars are spent after the crime has already been committed. Capital punishment wastes resources. It squanders the time and energy of courts, prosecuting attorneys, defense counsel, juries, and courtroom and correctional personnel. It unduly burdens the system of criminal justice, and it is therefore counterproductive as an instrument for society's control of violent crime. It epitomizes the tragic inefficacy and brutality of the resort to violence rather than reason for the solution of difficult social problems. A decent and humane society does not deliberately kill human beings. An execution is a dramatic, public .
spectacle of official, violent homicide that teaches the permissibility of killing people to solve social problems. In this century, governments have too often attempted to justify their lethal fury by the benefits such killing would bring to the rest of society. The bloodshed is real and deeply destructive of the common decency of the community; the benefits are illusory.
