that only the guilt die, increasing the chance that an innocent person will be subjected to this most irreversible and final of punishments. (Bedau 298) The possibility of an innocent person being put to death is another factor some people have against the death penalty. According to a 1987 Stanford University survey, at least 23 Americans have been wrongly executed in the twentieth century . In case of a mistake, the executed prisoner can not be given another chance and justice will have miscarried. In the last hundred years, there have been more than seventy- five documented cases wrongly conviction of criminal homicide. A death sentence was carried out on eight of these seventy- five individuals. Surely there are many other cases of mistaken convictions, and execution occurred and remained undocumented. A prisoner discovered to be blameless can be freed, but neither release nor compensation is possible for a corpse. The death penalty should be abolished because it is a barbaric form of punishment, which should not be allowed in the United Sates, which is supposedly one of the most civil nations in the world. It should also be abolished not only because it is barbaric, but it also defies the U.S. Constitution, which most Americans hold sacred. In addition to this, the death penalty even if it remains legal in the U.S. would not obtain its goal. The death penalty fails its main objective and because of the reasons stated above should be abolished. Works Cited American Civil Liberties Union.Goher:/gopher.pipeline.com:70/00/society/ aclu/publicatios/papers/8. Briefing Paper Number 8. Associated Press. News:death-penalty/urebo_5fn@clarinet.com. PD Chiefs: Death Penalty Fails. Bedau, Hugo Adam. Goher:/goher.pipeline.com:70/000society/aclu/issues/ death/case_against. The Case Against the Death Penalty Blumstein, Alfred and Jacqueline Cohen. Deterrence and Incapacitation: Estimating the Effects of Criminal Sanctions on Crime Rates. Washington, DC., 1978!

. National Academy of Sciences Van den Haag, Ernest. Punishing Criminals: Concerning a Very Old and Painful Question. New York, NY, 1975. Basic Books, Inc. Why Capital Punishment Should be Abolished Unlike popular belief, the death penalty does not act as a deterrent to criminals. As stated by Alfred Blumstein, "Expert after expert and study after study has shown the lack of correlation between the treat of the death penalty and the occurrence of violent crimes." (Blumstein 68) Isaac Ehrlich's study on the limiting effects of capital punishment in America reveals this to the public. The study spans twenty-five years, from 1957 till 1982, and shows that in the first year the study was conducted, there were 8060 murders and 6 executions. However, in the last year of the study there were 22,520 murders committed and only 1 execution performed. (Blumstein 54) This clearly shows that many violent criminals are not afraid of the capital punishment. Abolitionists believe the offenders should be required to compensate the victim's family with the offender's own income from employment or community service. There is no doubt that someone can do more alive than dead. By working, the criminal inadvert-ently "pays back" society and also their victim and/or victim's family. There is no reason for the criminal to receive any compensation for the work they do, because money is of no jail time. This could be considered a form of slavery to some, but it is no different from the days of being sent to the "yard" to break stone. One of the most well-known examples of the criminal contributing to the betterment of society is the case Leopld and Loeb. They were nineteen years old when they committed "The Crime of the Century." In 1924, they kidnapped and murdered a fourteen-year-old boy just to see how it would feel to kill someone. They were both spared the death penalty and sentenced to life imprisonment. (Bedau 78) Together their accomplishments included working in hospitals, teaching the illiterate

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