The Death Penalty Is Not Consistent with Democracy Many laws consider a premeditated crime to be more serious than a crime of pure violence. But what then is capital punishment if not the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal act, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty should punish a criminal who has warned his victim of the date on which he will inflict a horrible death and who, from that moment on, has confined her at his mercy for years. The Council of Europe states: “The death penalty can no longer be considered an acceptable form of punishment from a human rights perspective. It is an arbitrary, discriminatory and irreversible sanction when judicial errors cannot be ruled out, which can never be completely ruled out." reversed." Indeed, the Council went so far as to create Protocol No. 6 in 1983, which abolished capital punishment in peacetime. All new member states must ratify this legislation and, so far, 39 of the 41 member states of the Council they did. Nonetheless, 17 years after the adoption of Protocol No. 6 by the Council of Europe, the United States remains one of the few staunchest Western defenders of capital punishment they strongly supported the death penalty, and one candidate, George W. Bush, personally signed off on 35 executions in 1999 while he was governor of Texas Because capital punishment, condemned by most Western democracies, continued to have such strong support in the United States? Obviously, Europe and the United States are very different places, but it is... middle of paper. ...the problems cited by the Council as justification for the abolition of capital punishment remain unresolved in the United States today . Capital punishment is still arbitrary, discriminatory and irreversible in America. Yet despite these and other compelling reasons to abolish capital punishment, our nation still defends this barbaric, uncivilized, and cruel practice. For many Americans, capital punishment is a quick fix to a national crime problem. We have been willing to overlook the obvious injustices of this practice because we have convinced ourselves that it is making America a safer community. The acceptance of this myth must end. The United States should follow Europe's lead and recognize that the administration of capital punishment in this country is an inherently unjust judicial practice. We must call for a moratorium on the death penalty in America now.