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Capital punishment is the lawful infliction of the death penalty, and since ancient times, it has been used to punish a large variety of offenses. The penalty of death is reserved for the most serious and detested crimes. The legal system must sentence the death penalty to capital crime offenders. Criminals convicted of murder or rape need to be executed because they are dangerous to the world and the human race. However, America seems to to always want to put people in prison for life, but how is that fair to the criminals who did not commit such a horrible crime, but still gets the same punishment? The death penalty should be used more often, but is the death penalty the answer to crime? The death penalty is not the perfect answer to crime. Criminals should often be put to death; but this supposes a frequency of crimes, and from hence the punishment will cease to have its effect, so that it must be useful and useless at the same time (Black 74). So in other words, in all states where death is used as a punishment, every example supposes a new crime committed. To back these statements, facts show that since the reinstatement of capital punishment there has been over 255 executions with Texas at the top with 84 and Florida with 33 (Bender, Leone 103). Another statistic shows that more murders take place in states that use capital punishment. The common-sense argument that death is the best deterrent of crime rests on the belief that people fear death more than they fear anything else. If this, is true, then threatening a person with death will have a greater effect on their behavior than any other threat. However, according to Stephen Nathanson, people would rather die than spend the rest of their lives in prison (Whittier 14). Despite these facts, capital punishment should still be enforced on more criminals. The death penalty was used in Biblical times for crimes such as kidnapping and witchcraft. Today most countries still use capital punishment for many crimes...