by Ken Bradford

Created on: October 17, 2008

There is a 61-year-old prison inmate sitting on death row in the state of Florida who was sentenced to death at the age of 27. In his 34 years of solitary confinement on death row, he has not been allowed to associate with other inmates and has not been allowed to be "productive" in any way in the prison population. The massive number of appeals in his case have cost the tax payers thousands and thousands of dollars, with more appeals to come.

In the state of Ohio, there are currently 180 prison inmates on death row, some who were given the death penalty as early as 1984.

According to national statistics in 1996, there were 3,242 prison inmates on death row and in 2006, there were 3,228 under sentence of death. These same statistics indicate that in 2006, 53 of those inmates who had received the death penalty were actually executed, compared to 42 executions that took place in 2007.

Some would argue that executing a person convicted of a capital crime would be far cheaper than life imprisonment, but that argument just may not be correct.

Historical accounts indicate that the first execution in these United States took place in the early 1600's, when a military Captain was convicted of mutiny and was put to death by a firing squad.

The U. S. Department of Justice actually began compiling death penalty and execution statistics in the early 1930's and they indicate that 3,859 prisoners were executed from 1930 to 1967. By the end of the 1960's, most states in the U. S. had established laws authorizing the use of the death penalty as punishment in certain capital crimes. These state laws were opposed by many and as a result, there seemed to be a moratorium on the actual executions.

In 1972, the U. S. Supreme Court made a landmark decision in "Furman v. Georgia" (which was actually three cases combined) by ruling the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" as prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to our Constitution. Even though this decision invalidated every state law authorizing the death penalty, the Supreme Court in a vote of 5 to 4 could not reach a rationale for its decision and did not offer a controlling opinion of the Court, so each of the nine justices wrote separately.

Justice Blackmun wrote in his dissenting opinion:
"As I have said above, were I a legislator, I would do all I could to sponsor and to vote for legislation abolishing the death penalty. And were I the chief executive of a sovereign State, I would be sorely tempted to exercise

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