Since 1930, 89 percent of those executed in the United States for rape have been black, as were 76 percent of those executed for robbery, 85.5 percent of those executed for assault by life-term prisoner, 48.9 percent of those executed for murder, 100 percent of those executed for burglary. All together, 53.5 percent of those we have put to death in this Nation since 1930 have been black (Bedau). Study after study turns up the same results, one can conclude that there is a pattern of discrimination. One study shows that prosecutors seek the death penalty most often when the victim is white. Prosecutors sought the death penalty twice as often when the victim was white as when the victim was a member of a racial minority. "In cases of white victims, 27 percent sought the death penalty, where only 19 percent in cases of minority victims (Bedau)." In most states where the death penalty is instated, it is done so to deter crime. I think the feeling toward capital punishment boils down to two things. It is a kind of feeling most of us have that death really scares us, and a harsh penalty, you have to say deters more than life imprisonment. But if you took the death penalty away, most of us would be just as scared by a life imprisonment. Secondly, most of us who are thinking about this subject are well adjusted, normal, non-murderers. We do not commit murder, not because of the existence of the death penalty, but because we are morally developed, life respecting citizens. The people that do commit murders are of a different sort, their minds do not work like the rest of us. Whether you call them insane, phycopaths or whatever, no amount of punishment could have an effect on them. Now that is not to say it is impossible that, in some few cases, the death penalty did deter a capital crime. These cases, if they exist, must be very few, since they do not show up in the comparative statistical studies.