Many people want to abandon capital punishment and focus on rehabilitating hardened criminals. What happens when a supposedly rehabilitated criminal leaves jail and kills one more person? Capital punishment is an effective and necessary part of the judicial system to punish those who have committed the most deplorable crimes in society. Although controversial, it is unlikely that the United States will abandon capital punishment anytime soon like many of the European countries. The death penalty can be an effective crime deterrent even if crime statistics do not show otherwise. The death penalty should be administered for particularly heinous crimes.
             The United States stands alone on Capital Punishment
             The Unites States is one of the few industrialized countries that still use capital punishment in its judicial system (Langer). Many people feel that the United States should fold to the European pressure to stop using capital punishment. Most European countries quit using the death penalty around or very shortly after World War Two. The United States cannot be pressured into abandoning this effective punishment for the most serious crimes. "The United States stands alone among Western countries in its use of the death penalty," says Douglass Cassell, the director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law (Wolf). In the year 1998 the governments of 92 countries had abolished the death penalty in the law or practically. The government of 13 countries had kept the death penalty for crimes only committed during wartime. About 90 countries had kept the capital punishment. In 2001 there was 3,048 criminals from 31 different countries executed (official numbers), and 5,265 criminals in 68 countries were sentenced to death. The most executions were performed in China. In the USA there was 66 criminals executed(Amnesty International).
             In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Uni...