er in jail for life will be very expensive considering that it costs $80,000 a year; and the bad news is that the money comes from the taxpayers pocket. Thousands of people will attack the death penalty. They will give emotional speeches about the one innocent man who might be executed. However, all of these people are forgetting one crucial element. They are forgetting the thousands of victims who die every year. This may sound awkward, but the death penalty saves lives. It saves lives because it stops those who murder from ever murdering again (Bryant). These opinions represent some of the strongest and most influential views that proponents hold. However, if our prison system could rehabilitate more effectively, perhaps those who murdered once, could change. Texas being one of the states within the U.S. that allows Capital Punishment also has one of the largest death rows. Jim Mattox, former Attorney General of Texas, who supported the death penalty during his term of office, does not believe that murderers in Texas are hindered by the death penalty. Mattox interviewed nearly all the people executed in Texas between 1976 and 1988 and concluded that the death sentence never crossed their minds before they committed their crime. It is my own experience that those executed in Texas were not deterred by the existence of the death penalty, he said (Death). It seems that even supporters of the death penalty are unsure of its effectiveness. One of the most controversial applications of the death penalty has been developing for twenty-two years in Texas. Joseph Faulder, a Canadian citizen, was sentenced to death in 1977 for a murder committed in Dallas. Canada, his home country, does not practice Capital Punishment. Though he appealed seventeen times, and his execution would violate a two-hundred year old federal law known as the Alien Tort Claims Act, the Texas judiciary system sent Faulder to his death on June 17, 1999. Ev...
