confessions and search-and-seizure. Critics believe this created a lengthy and almost endless appeals process. The immediate result was that executions virtually ended after 1964. In 1971 the justices declared all existing death penalties to be unconstitutional. This ban was not lifted until 1978. Only after legislative reformulation did more than half the states impose the death penalty on murderers by the 1990's (Tucker, 2000). Death-penalty proponents claim the impact on capital-punishment crimes are plain. Beginning at almost the exact point when executions ended, murder soared to unprecedented heights. The murder rate tied the 1933 record in 1973, broke it in 1974, broke it again in 1980, and peaked a third time in 1990-92. Then suddenly it plummeted, so that by 1999 we were once again back to the levels of 1966 when murder first began its upward sweep. Proponents say this proves that executions deter crime. Stop executing people, murders soar. Resume executing people, murders decline (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/exe.txt). Death-penalty proponents also dismiss the idea that capital punishment is "state sanctioned" murder. Syndicated columnist Charley Reese made an interesting analogy. Reese states that opponents equate execution and murder, believing that if two acts have the same ending or result, then those two acts are morally equivalent. He goes on to rationalize such questions as: 1) is the legal taking of property to satisfy a debt the same as auto theft; 2) Are kidnapping and legal incarceration the same if both involve imprisonment against one's will; and 3) is rape and making love the same if both may result in sexual intercourse? Reese is also confounded by opponents who see no moral distinction between the slaughter of innocent people and the just execution of society's human rights violators (www.prodeathpenalty.com).Opponent's View This author finds it ironic and interesting that a vast majority o...
