The United States Department of Justice says that between 1980 and 2008, African Americans committed 52.5% of the murders in the United States; whites committed 45.3%; and Native Americans and Asians committed 2.2%. This means African Americans are less likely to be executed on a per capita basis. The Department of Justice also says that as of 2009, Hispanic or Latino people make up 17.4% of the United States population, but only 13.5% of death row prisoners.
A 2012 study found that non-white soldiers in the United States military are twice as likely as white soldiers to be given the death penalty. Of the 16 soldiers the military has sentenced to death between 1985 and 2012, 10 (62.5%) were non-whites, one of the study's authors said.
The death penalty is definitely given much more often to men than women. As of October 1, 2014:
The University of Michigan Law School keeps a list of people who have been exonerated from death row. The list counts "exonerations" as cases where "a person who has been convicted of a crime is officially cleared based on new evidence of innocence."
According to the list, between 1989 and 2015, 116 people have been exonerated from death row. The most common reasons why these people were exonerated were:
DNA evidence proved that 25 of these people about 22% were innocent of the crimes they were sentenced to death for.
Of the 116 people who were exonerated, 62 (about 53%) were black, 43 (37%) were white, 9 (8%) were Hispanic, and two were members of other races (2%). In the 88 cases where a government official abused their power, 51 of the exonerated people (about 58%) were black; 29 were Caucasian (33%); and 8 (9%) were Hispanic. Seventeen of the 31 people who received an "inadequate legal defense" (about 55%) were black; 12 (about 39%) were white; and two (about 6%) were Hispanic.
The death penalty is a very controversial topic in the United States. People have argued about it since before the Thirteen Colonies became the United States. There are many different arguments for and against the death penalty. This list does not include all of them, just some of the most common ones.
People who do not agree with the death penalty (death penalty "opponents") say our trial system is not perfect. Judges and juries make mistakes. One study done by Columbia Law School found that there were serious mistakes in two-thirds of all capital trials. In these trials, the defendants were sentenced to death anyway. However, when their cases were appealed, over 80% of the defendants were not sentenced to death; 7% were found not guilty.
Opponents argue that because mistakes are so common in capital trials, people can be executed even though they were innocent. As proof, they point the 116 people who were exonerated from death row between 1989 and 2015.
People who support the death penalty (death penalty "supporters") say that mistakes are very rare, especially since new laws were made in the 1970s to add protections for death row inmates. For example, Steve Stewart, Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for the Clark County, Indiana, Fourth Judicial Court, says:
Death penalty supporters say that capital punishment is a "deterrent". This means that people are scared of the death penalty and are less likely to commit a capital crime if they know they could get the death penalty.
Supporters also argue that the next most serious punishment for capital crimes is life in prison. In some states, this means the person could be let out of prison someday. Also, even being in prison for life does not keep killers from killing more people in prison. Executing people is the only way to make sure they will never kill another person.
Opponents argue that nobody has ever proved that capital punishment is more of a deterrent than a long prison sentence. They point out that most states and countries that do not have the death penalty have lower murder rates than death penalty states. They also say that the death penalty is not a deterrent because people often commit murders when they are very upset and are not thinking about what might happen in the future.
Among scholars and researchers, there is no agreement about whether capital punishment is more of a deterrent than any other punishment. Some researchers have done studies that say the death penalty is a deterrent. Other studies have found that the death penalty is not a deterrent in the United States, or in other countries.
Opponents argue that defendants who are poor and/or non-white are more likely to get the death penalty than whites, even if they have committed the same crimes. Supporters say that opponents misuse statistics and exaggerate the situation. For more information, see the section on Sentencing: Among races farther up on this page.
Death penalty debaters argue about whether capital punishment is "cruel and unusual punishment" (which would be unconstitutional). Even the people on the Supreme Court have disagreed on this issue. In 2004, the Court ruled in "Baze v. Rice" that even if an execution causes pain, that does not make it cruel and unusual. However, in his dissenting opinion in "Gregg v. Georgia", Justice William Brennan wrote that the death penalty is "an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain... [it] is today a cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the ... Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments."
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an anti-death penalty group, adds that capital punishment is "unusual" because:
Religion plays a complicated role in death penalty arguments. To support the death penalty, some people quote from the Old Testament of the Bible, which says: "An eye for an eye, a life for a life." This means that if you take a life, you should pay with your own life. However, others use parts of the New Testament, where Jesus talks about forgiveness and nonviolence, to oppose the death penalty. They say that no one has the right to take a life but God even if that person has taken a life himself.
In 1999, a group of Jewish rabbis and Catholic Bishops had this to say:
Opponents also point out:
Biological half-life
A half life of a substance is the amount of time it takes to decay into half of its activity. Usually, this refers to the body's getting rid of a substance. This happens by the function of kidneys and liver as well as excretion.
Der Barbier von Bagdad
Der Barbier von Bagdad ("The Barber of Baghdad"), is an German comic opera with music and libretto by Peter Cornelius. based on The Tale of the Tailor and The Barber’s Stories of his Six Brothers in One Thousand and One Nights. It was first performed in Weimar, on December 15, 1858. By far Cornelius' most successful work and his only opera still regularly performed.
Marcelo Martins Moreno
Marcelo Martins Moreno (born 18 June 1987 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia), known as Marcelo Martins or Marcelo Moreno, is a Bolivian professional footballer who plays as a striker for Chinese Super League club Changchun Yatai and the Bolivia national football team.
CRISPR
CRISPR is a term used in microbiology. It stands for Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. These are a natural segment of the genetic code found in prokaryotes: most bacteria and archaea have it.
CRISPR has a lot of short repeated sequences. These sequences are part of an adaptive immune system for prokaryotes. It allows them to remember and counter other organisms that prey on them, such as bacteriophages. They work as a kind of acquired immunity for bacteria.
They have the potential to modify the genes of almost any organism. They are part of a tool that allows precisely targeted cutting and insertion of genes in genetic modification (GM). Work is under way to find how they can be used to attack virus diseases in humans (gene therapy).