KIM LAWTON, guest anchor: Across the country, more than 3,000 inmates are on death row waiting to be executed or reprieved. So far this year (2007), nine executions have taken place in America, eight of them in Texas, which for several years now has executed more prisoners than any other state. All executions in Texas occur in one place -- Huntsville. Lucky Severson went there and filed this report.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Cemeteries are always lonely places, and this is one of the loneliest. Most of the men and women buried here were executed by the state of Texas, and apparently no one in their family wanted to claim the body. The number of headstones reflects the fact that Texas has executed more prisoners than any state in the nation. What can't be buried here is the profound pain that has ruined so many lives.

Chaplain Richard Lopez ministered to dozens of men on death row, watched them die, and then conducted their funerals. He believes that eight out of 10 repent before they meet their maker.

Chaplain RICHARD LOPEZ: I have felt more useful as a servant of God ministering to those men than anything I have done in my life. I believe that I have been able to bring them hope, to bring them peace that God has given me in my life.

SEVERSON: Paula Kurland says she couldn't have made it through the last 17 years without God holding her hand, and even then the pain from the brutal murder of her daughter never goes away.

PAULA KURLAND: (Mother of Murder Victim): Mitzi was murdered in Austin, Texas, September 13, 1986 on her 21st birthday. Mitzi's roommate was stabbed 14 times, and her throat was slit twice and Mitzi was stabbed 28 times and it was so violent that he fought her all the way back into her bedroom and into her closet and she died in a fetal position. I literally died, I was a walking dead person. My children lost their sister and their mother in one night. They're just now getting their mother back. They will never get their sister back.

SEVERSON: The Huntsville First Baptist Church is located directly across the street from the building known as the walls unit, where Texas executes the condemned by lethal injection. The church ministers to victim's families, inmates families, and prison guards. It is a calling the church takes very seriously.

Pastor DAVID VALENTINE (Huntsville First Baptist Church): You know in Ezekiel, it says, "The soul that sins shall die."

SEVERSON: Pastor David Valentine says his congregation is compassionate, but strongly pro-death penalty.

Pastor VALENTINE: We need to understand the concept from scripture of individual responsibility. Revenge is if I hurt someone in y our family and you come after me to hurt me back. That's revenge. Justice is when a third party intervenes and implements judgment according to the law. We are not to be the revenge people but to allow God through government to avenge the death through justice.

SEVERSON: Like the church, the town is overwhelmingly pro capital punishment, something like 78 percent. According to a Gallup survey, nationwide 72 percent favor the death penalty, down from a few years ago.

Almost half of those polled said they support capital punishment because of the biblical reference to an "eye for and eye." But scholars say an "eye for an eye" was actually instituted as a measure of leniency - that the punishment should fit the crime.

Pastor VALENTINE: My understanding is the culture, 1000 years ago, that if you did a crime against me or my government, what I would do is not only eliminate you, but your family as punishment, and this "eye for an eye" what that did was to limit how far retribution or justice could go.

SEVERSON: Huntsville district attorney David Weeks grew up a pacifist opposed to capital punishment. But he says he has learned that some people are different -- that some are natural born predators.

DAVID WEEKS (District Attorney, Huntsville, Texas): They send me Christmas cards, but I hope they never get out of prison.

SEVERSON: He says he's tried 10 death penalty cases, but he doesn't always push for the maximum punishment.

Mr. WEEKS: The death penalty ought to be confined to the worst of the worst. There are some crimes, some individuals who are so outside the bounds that you have to draw the line someplace. You have to have the ultimate punishment to make the rest of the punishments work.

SEVERSON: And he believes the death punishment deters homicides.

Mr. WEEKS: I believe it's a deterrent. I believe it's a necessary part of the criminal justice system that when the crime or the individual is so bad that the ultimate penalty has to be there.

SEVERSON (to Emmett Solomon): You don't think capital punishment is a deterrent?

EMMETT SOLOMON (Former Death Row Chaplain): No, capital punishment is a deterrent for that person, but it's not a deterrent in terms of reducing crime. Actually crime rates generally run a little higher where they do have capital punishment.

SEVERSON: Emmett Solomon is a former death row chaplain, who has devoted his life to healing. There's a lot to be done. Look at his map. Each pin represents a prison or jail. There are 210 in Texas; 150,000 inmates -- 438 men, eight women on death row.

Mr. SOLOMON: Society has a right to have the death penalty. What I also think that society is much better off and more mature if it choose not to use it. The only thing they could think of is getting poetic justice, doing the same thing back to that person. But in the end, brutality breeds brutality.