venge and the "frustration and rage of people who see that the government is not coping with violent crime," are not of good will, thereby making capital punishment immoral according to ethical philosophy (Bruck 329). The question of whether executions are a cruel form of punishment may no longer be an argument against capital punishment now that it can be done with lethal injections. Capitol punishment is still very "unusual" in that it only applies to a select number of individuals making the death penalty completely discriminatory and arbitrary. After years of watching the ineffectiveness of determining who should be put to death, the Supreme Court in the1972 ,Furman v. Georgia decision "invalidated all existing death sentence statues as violative of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment and thus depopulated state death rows of 629 occupants" (Berger 352). This decision was reached not because it was believed that the death penalty was intrinsically cruel and unusual but because, as Justice Stewart put it, the "death penalty as actually applied was unconstitutionally arbitrary" (Berger353). Local politics, money, race, and where the crime is committed can often play a more decisive role in sentencing someone to death than the actual facts of the crime. According to Amnesty International, the "death penalty is a lethal lottery". "Just one out of every one hundred people arrested for murder is actually executed" (Death Penalty Focus). In regards to racial discrimination in sentencing, it has been found that "racial bias focuses primarily on the race of the victim, not the defendant" (Berger 355). Only 31 out of the more than 15, 000 recorded executions in this country have been of white defendants convicted of killing black victims, while black defendants convicted of raping white women were commonly sentenced to death (Death Penalty Focus). Stephen Nathanson, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University ad...
