The death penalty is an issue that’s much on the controversial side and there are those who believe it to be just and right; alongside there are also those who believe it to be cruel and unusual punishment. The first time that the thought of introducing a death penalty in the United States was during the year 1608 against a man named George Kendall who was accused of being a spy for Spain making him the first person to be executed on American soil (Death Penalty Info Center). Later on it went as far as giving people the death penalty for theft of grapes, making trades between Indians, and killing chickens; these reasons were soon revised and repealed by Bradford in Pennsylvania during 1794 and it changed the course of action towards the death penalty to be enforced only if charged with first degree murder.
Statistics for the death penalty can be found on the death penalty information center website, this data can be viewed by choosing a particular state and what the stats is for that certain state. The kind of stats that are included on this part of the website is the number of executions before 1976, the population of death row, women on death row, the date the death penalty reenacted, and a number of people freed from death row; the other website that is of good use is oyez which lists all the current death penalty supreme court cases and their outcomes. In the case of Furman vs. Georgia the big question that was raised by carrying out the death penalty was it an act of cruel and unusual punishment with clear violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth amendment; the opinion of the court was that the death penalty in this case and the ones attached to it were in clear violation of the constitution. There were only two justices tha...
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...orporal Punishment in Judaism." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Nov. 2013. Web. 08 Dec. 2013.
"Cases by Issue - Death Penalty." The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2013.
"Death Penalty : Facts." Death Penalty : Facts. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2013.
"FURMAN v. GEORGIA." Furman v. Georgia. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2013.
"Part I: History of the Death Penalty." Death Penalty Information Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2013.
"State by State Database." Death Penalty Information Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2013.
"Terry Lenamon on the Death Penalty : Lawyer & Attorney Terry Lenamon on Capital Punishment Defense, Death Penalty Trials & Appeals | Law Firm." Terry Lenamon's List of Federal Death Penalty Aggravating Factors and Mitigating Circumstances : Terry Lenamon on the Death Penalty. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.
Lester, D. (1998). The death penalty issues and answers (2nd edition.). Springfield, IL: Library of Congress Cataloging.
The death penalty dates all the way back to Eighteenth Century B.C.. It was codified in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon and it was used as punishment for 25 different types of crimes. It was also a part of the Hittie Code in Fourteenth Century B.C., the Draconian Code of Athens, the Roman Law of the Twelve Tablets, and in Tenth Century B.C. in Britain. The death sentence was carried out in various ways including, drowning, burning alive, crucifixion, beating and hanging (Death Penalty Information Center, 2014).
By the mid 1960s, the death penalty seemed fated for extinction. Only seven executions were conducted in 1965 and only one in 1966. For about ten years supporters and opposers of capital punishment looked to the Supreme Court for a final ruling on the constitutionality of the death penalty. The word came out in 1976 in the case of Gregg v. Georgia. The court ruled that, " the punishment of death does not violate the Constitution."
Radelet, Michael L., updated by the Death Penalty Information Center. Post-Furman Botched Executions. The Death Penalty Information Center
Geraghty, Thomas F. "Trying to Understand America’s Death Penalty System and Why We Still Have it." Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 94.1 (2003): 209-237. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 5 Nov. 2009.
Latzer, Barry. Death Penalty Cases: Leading U.S. Supreme Court Cases on Capital Punishment. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998.
21 David C. Baldus, et al, "Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience," The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 74 (1983): 663-664.
“The case Against the Death Penalty.” aclu.org. American Civil Liberties Union, 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2013
"The Case Against the Death Penalty." American Civil Liberties Union. The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU Foundation., 2011. Web. 01 Nov. 2014.
The death penalty has been accepted in the United States, but was not always approved by the people. In the late eighteen hundreds there was enough attention gathered to the death penalty to lead to restrictions. Many northern states abolished the practice all together like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island (Wilson p.45). Pennsylvania in 1794 decided to revises its laws on the death penalty. The state decided to use the penalty mainly for first-degree murder. Around this time many states where deciding t...
Gray, James P. "Essay: Facing Facts On The Death Penalty." Loyola Of Los Angeles Law Review 44.3 (2011): S255-S264. Academic Search Complete. Web. 16 Nov. 2013.
The death penalty has been around since the time of Jesus Christ. Executions have been recorded from the 1600s to present times. From about 1620, the executions by year increased in the US. It has been a steady increase up until the 1930s; later the death penalty dropped to zero in the 1970s and then again rose steadily. US citizens said that the death penalty was unconstitutional because it was believed that it was "cruel and unusual" punishment (Amnesty International). In the 1970s, the executions by year dropped between zero and one then started to rise again in the 1980s. In the year 2000, there were nearly one hundred executions in the US (News Batch). On June 29, 1972, the death penalty was suspended because the existing laws were no longer convincing. However, four years after this occurred, several cases came about in Georgia, Florida, and Texas where lawyers wanted the death penalty. This set new laws in these states and later the Supreme Court decided that the death penalty was constitutional under the Eighth Amendment (Amnesty International).
Pasquerella, Lynn. “The Death Penalty in the United States.” The Study Circle Resource Center of Topsfield Foundation. July 1991. Topsfield Foundation. 03 Feb 2011. Web.
To start off, I will discuss the history of the death penalty. The first established death penalty laws date as far back as the Eighteenth Century B.C. in the code of King Hammaurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for 25 different crimes. Death sentences were carried out by such means as crucifixion, boiling, beheading, drowning, beating to death, burning alive, and impalement.
Cavanagh, Suzanne. “Capital Punishment: A Brief Overview”. CRS Report For Congress 95-505GOV (1995): 4. Sellin, Thorsten. The Penalty of Death. Sage Publishing Co.,1980.