tions and 14,590 murders, and 1975, after six more years without executions 20,510 murders occurred" (Siegel, 50). The number of murders grew as the number of executions shrank. More recently, "there have been 56 executions in the US in 1995, and there has been a 12% drop in the murder rate nationwide" (Siegel, 51).People have referred to democratic S. Africa as one of the most violent places on earth. The New York Times magazine carried a story on the epidemic of rapes of children in that country: 120.6 rapes for every 100,000 women as compared with 71 in the U.S. (15). One reason for the increase in attacks on young children is that rapists think they are less likely to have AIDS since they know that AIDS has skyrocketed among the adults of S. Africa. Those rapist are less likely to attack grown women because they fear the lethal consequences of AIDS. This demonstrates that violent criminals are indeed capable of being deterred by lethal consequences. If the death penalty was just as consistent, lethal, and unstoppable as the AIDS virus, criminals would actually have reason to back down. Abolitionists will claim that most studies show that the death penalty had no effect on the murder rate at all. They neglect to inform themselves that those studies are based on inconsistent executions. Capital punishment must be used consistently in order to be effective. Abolitionists claim that there are alternatives to the death penalty. They state that life in prison without parole serves just as well. However, in order to make that statement, one must ignore all the murders criminals commit within prison when they kill prison guards and other inmates, and also when they kill citizens upon escape. For example, Dawned Mu'Min who was serving a 48-year sentence for the 1973 murder of a cab driver when he escaped a road work gang and stabbed to death a storekeeper in a 1988 robbery. Fortunately, there is now no chance of Mu'Min committ...
