Does capital punishment really help? Many people say that it lowers the murder rate man many think it is cruel to take some ones life. The statistics do not show a decrease in murders where capital punishment is in place. Should the penalty be abolished if it is not helping? Is this penalty effective in putting the real murderers at justice. This can also be used against racial groups such as blacks. In fact the statistics show that more black people have been killed on death row then whites.
             Since 1976 more than 450 executions have been carried out. Many court decisions of the 1980s and early 1990s made the death penalty easier and more likely. In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that opponents of executions may be barred from juries in murder cases. The next year the Court ruled that accomplices in crimes that led to murder may be sentenced to death. That same year the Court rejected a challenge to capital punishment based on statistics that indicated racial bias in sentencing. In separate decisions in 1989 the Court decided that the death penalty could be applied to those who were mentally retarded or who were underage but are at least 16 at the time of the murder. In the 1990s the trend of Supreme Court rulings was to limit the appeals that inmates sentenced to death could make to the federal courts.
             Critics of the death penalty have always pointed to the risk of executing the innocent. Definitely established cases of this sort in recent years are rare. Opponents have also argued that one can accept a retributive theory of punishment without necessarily resorting to the death penalty. According to opponents of capital punishment, proportioning the severity of punishment to the gravity of the crime does not require the primitive rule of "a life for a life."
             Legislation signed into law on June 8, 1995, provided the option of lethal injection as a means of executing a condemned person. South Carolina w
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