On May 2, 2000, the State of Arkansas put 28 year-old Christina Riggs to death for killing her two children. The execution method was lethal injection. According to a witness, the executioners planned to administer the shot through veins in her elbows, but when they had trouble finding one, Riggs gave them permission to inject through her hands. A confessed murderer, Riggs had admitted to smothering her two children when potassium chloride failed to kill them. While Riggs at first attributed the murders to depression, the prosecution argued that she had killed her children because they had become an inconvenience to her lifestyle. Witnesses had seen Riggs singing karaoke on several nights prior to her children's deaths.

In 1967, a moratorium was placed on the death penalty as the Supreme Court debated its constitutionality. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment, which protects Americans from "cruel and unusual" punishment - largely because it was determined not to be applied fairly. In 1976 the Court ruled that, in certain cases, the death penalty was a legitimate punishment, and now, it is practiced in all but 13 states and the District of Columbia.

Since 1977, 611 people have been executed in the United States. In the last year, executions in the U.S. have been carried out at an increasing rate, with more than half of the executions since 1976 having occurred in the last five years.

On One Hand...

Our criminal justice system has no basis for deciding whether an individual deserves or does not deserve to live. Because the death penalty is the one punishment that can never be reversed, it is always unjust - our courts should be proven incapable of error before using it. Despite one being carried out every 3.5 days - the current rate of executions in the U.S. - a plague of violent crime continues, proving that the death penalty is not working as a deterrent either. The death penalty is just one more way to get revenge in a society that is already consumed with violence. Many countries have already abolished the penalty. The United States, which has always taken a strong stand for fairness in criminal justice systems, should join those nations in denouncing capital punishment.

On the Other Hand...

Capital punishment is both constitutional and morally right. Prisons are used to reform criminals, but in certain cases - when guilt is unmistakable and the accused has a history of violent behavior - society has the right to demand the ultimate punishment. It doesn't make sense to give someone who has been convicted of murder the chance to commit another. But this happens all too frequently. This April, in Minneapolis, a 32 year-old man was arrested for the murder of a woman. The same man had been convicted of a third-degree murder in 1987. In Texas, Algernon Doby was captured after shooting a pregnant woman and killing her boyfriend, only seven months after Doby had been paroled for a previous murder. With such continual failures in our justice system, Americans deserve to know that murderers will face the same fate as their victims.

• This April, Congressmen Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) and Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) introduced the Innocence Protection Act, the House version of Sen. Patrick Leahy's (D-Vt.) bill. It is designed to ensure that death-row defendants are completely represented and have access to DNA evidence. "We must be sure that every legal and technological method is provided to determine guilt in capital cases," said LaHood. LaHood supports capital punishment.

• According to Amnesty International, more than two countries a year on average have abolished the death penalty in law since 1976. Seventy countries, including Australia, Germany, and Spain, refuse to impose the death penalty for any crime.

• On March 22, in Beeville, Texas, a convicted killer already serving a life sentence was indicted Tuesday for murder in the death of the prison guard Daniel Nagle. Robert Lynn Pruit, 20, had been serving a life term for a murder committed when he was 30.

• An ACLU study released this months found that lawyers whose clients ended up on Virginia's death row were six times more likely than other lawyers to be disciplined in the course of their careers. One of every 10 defendants sentenced in Virginia was represented by a lawyer who at some point has lose their license, the study found.

• In 1992, Roger Keith Coleman was strapped into his electric chair while protesting his innocence. Coleman claimed he had an alibi and that a post-trial DNA test indicated that a second person was involved. But the Supreme Court of Virginia refused to hear the case because the lawyer filed a day late.

• There are currently 459 inmates on Death Row in Texas. There are 368 in Florida. There are 29 in Virginia.