ve a sentence for life imprisonment or a death sentence. The federal government can give a death sentence to individuals who serve as spies, give out government secrets, or betray the United States government in these ways (Zimring). Potential murderers are not deterred because the odds that he or she will be executed for the crime are in the murderers favor. If the murderer does receive a death sentence, he or she has numerous opportunities to prevent the execution with appeals and last-ditch efforts to attempt to prove the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment. Of the nearly six hundred people sentenced to death since the death penalty was reinstated in 1972, no one has ever been able to prove the cruel and unusual punishment argument (Murray). This appeal, by far the most popular with death row inmates, consists of challenging the Supreme Courts ruling that capital punishment is not cruel and unusual punishment. If an inmate could get a judge to rule that the death penalty was cruel and unusual, then his or her lawyer could cite that the death penalty is unconstitutional according to the Fourth and Eighteenth Amendments. Even if the appeal is denied, the process takes up time and prevents the execution from happening. Unless these problems are solved, the death penalty will never be a deterrent to violent crimes in America. Most advocates reason that if others see death as a punishment, they will be less likely to commit crimes. Even if deterrence did work, the punishment would have to occur promptly, consistently and openly. It would have to be promptly because no criminal worries what will happen ten years down the road. It would have to be consistently because, if everyone else's lawyers can get him or her off, what do the inmates have to fear? And it would have to be openly, that's the easiest of all: Changing a person's behavior is dependent on exposure to the very source of deterrence (Eisenberg). If...
