prince1000 wrote:im not argueing a case for his innocence, though he may very well be, but rather that i can't see any way to justify being put to death for anything. i know it's hard to understand, your head being full of ground beef and all...
Ultimately its a matter of opinion, and there are claimed riteous arguments on both sides of the issue. There's data suggesting more crime comes from the death penalty, but much of it is correlative, and only proves a trend. In states where there are more executions are there more murders?
Texas had a murder rate of ~7 in 1998 according to some data, whereas Louisiana had a rate of ~13 (nearly double). Texas, however, had many more executions (over 75) than Louisiana (26-50) despite also having not more people on death row (by a LARGE number 87 vs 446). So the number of executions doesnt correlate to the number of murders in this situation, as well as in numerous other situations. Additionally, in Puff's graph above, many of the states there have very low populations, so it would be more relevant to have that data normalized to population density. The sources for these numbers are from CNN.
EDIT: In 1998 alone (as opposed to cumulative data) there were 0 executions in louisiana and 20 in texas...
