"Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, to me, would be grounds for capital punishment..." -- Clint Eastwood"I couldn't become an American citizen. I would not want to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment." -- Werner Herzog In most of the industrialized world, capital punishment is not used to punish criminals. However, it is still used in the United States. The debate over capital punishment in the United States has raged for nearly four hundred years. Supporters of capital punishment often cite its deterrent and punitive role as reasons for supporting the death penalty. Opponents of capital punishment cite its arbitrariness and finality as reasons for their opposition to the death penalty. Because capital punishment can lead to an unfair application of justice, sometimes to the point of executing innocent people, no amount of argument from its supporters should prevent its abolition. The Arguments of Those in favor of Capital Punishment Supporters of capital punishment begin by arguing that capital punishment discourages murder. This view has been held for thousands of years. In his book The Death Penalty, Thorsten Sellin notes what the famous 18th-century English legal commentator William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England: As to the end or final cause of punishment, this is not a atonement. .but as a prevention against future crimes of the same kind. This is done in three ways: either by changing the offender… or by discouraging others… or finally by depriving the offending party of the power to do future harm. (Sellin 77) This sentiment was expressed by Socrates (in Gorgias) and his antagonist Demosthenes some 2,000 years before Blackstone (Sellin 3-5). But what evidence is there to support the idea that the death penalty deters potential murderers better than any other form of punishment? Until Professor Isaac Ehrlich published his study on this topic, only anecdotal evidence existed, provided by people in the fields of law enforcement, judicial and penitentiary. In 1953, the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in England observed: ...capital punishment has obviously failed as a deterrent when murder is committed. We can enumerate its failures. But we cannot enumerate his successes. No one will ever know how many people refrained from killing for fear of being hanged.