two murders, when the time came for his court order, he said that he preferred to die rather than life imprisonment, and his last words before execution were that regretted getting caught! This proves that he was not at all sorry for his actions and neither had he any fear, which demolishes the whole purpose of capital punishment (Winters 8). I would also like to add the comment of U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno At her weekly Justice Department news briefing. She said that, "I have inquired for most of my adult life about studies that might show that the death penalty is a deterrent. And I have not seen any research that would substantiate that point." The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the South repeatedly has the highest murder rate. In 1997, it was the only region with a murder rate above the national rate. The South accounts for 80% of executions. The Northeast, which has less than 1% of all executions in the U.S., has the lowest murder rate (Richard 4). The danger that innocent people will be executed because of errors in the criminal justice system is getting worse. A total of 69 people have been released from death row since 1973 after evidence of their innocence emerged. Twenty-one condemned inmates have been released since 1993, including seven from the state of Illinois alone. Many of these cases were discovered not because of the normal appeals process, but rather as a result of new scientific techniques, investigations by journalists, and the dedicated work of expert attorneys, not available to the typical death row inmate. These reports tells the stories of people like Rolando Cruz, released after 10 years on Illinois's death row, despite the fact that another man had confessed to the crime shortly after his conviction. Ricardo Aldape Guerra, who returned to Mexico after 15 years on Texas's death row because of a prosecution that a federal judge called outrageous and designed ...
