According to Bedau, murderers are not influenced by the death penalty as a punishment, since they carefully plan their murders thinking that they will not get caught (171). Therefore, the criminals do not think about the consequences they will face if they are captured. Although many arguments can be made in favor of capital punishment, the arguments against capital punishment are more convincing. First, the justice system is not infallible. Too many innocent people lose their lives for a crime they never committed; At a time when capital punishment has become widely accepted for the worst crimes, critics say a strange brew of prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias and inadequate legal defense is sending innocent people to death row (Vilbig 2). The risk of executing the innocent is too high. Unlike the other criminal punishments, the death penalty is final. If new evidence is brought up proving the innocence of a convicted criminal, he or she would lose this chance at freedom since the death penalty was already applied. Once the court rules that one is guilty and the state executes that person, it is impossible to reverse the execution. Since 1973, 1,861 cases, thirty-five percent, of all death row cases were called back for process reasons. From those 1,861 cases, as many as 52 of those cases were invalidated based on some evidence of innocence. Even with those destructions, further studies demonstrated that at least twenty-three innocent persons were executed since 1900. Additionally, another 350 cases, out of the 7,200 cases, were considered wrongly convicted. That is almost four cases per year in which an innocent person was convicted for a murder. These statistics show the fallibility of human judgment and how erroneous a decision of death penalty can be. As Marquis de Lafayette from the French Chamber of Deputies once said, "I shall ask for the abolition of the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of hu...
