ent in favor of the death penalty has usually been interpreted as a proper and moral reason for putting a murderer to death. Crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty than the severity of punishment 25 are its opposition. Both quotes imply that the murderer deserves punishment and it was his own fault for putting himself on death row. When looking at the 8th Amendment Trop v. Dulles ruled that punishments not be cruel and unusual but the punishments must draw from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of evolving a evolving society. 26 Supporters of capital punishment say that society has the right to kill in defense of its members, just as an individual has the right to kill in self defense for his or her own personal safety. This analogy is somewhat doubtful, however, as long as the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent to violent crimes has yet to be proven. In the United States, the main objection to capital punishment has been that it was always used unfairly, in at least three major ways. First, females are rarely sentenced to death and executed, even though women committed 20 percent of all murders that have occurred in recent years. Women represent the fasted growing population in prison. Between 1980 and 1993, the growth rate for the female prison population increased approximately 313%, compared to 182% for men in the same period. At the end of 1993 women accounted for 5.8% of the total prison population and 9.3% of the jail population nationwide. Women prisoners are disproportionately women of color, with African American women comprising 46% of the population nationwide, White women comprising 36%, and Hispanic Women comprising 14%. 27 Second, a disproportionate number of nonwhites are sentenced to death and executed. A black man who kills a white person is 11 times more likely to receive the death penalty than a white man who kills a black person. In Texas in 1991, blacks m...
