Death Pernalty

Death Penalty

The death penalty also known as capital punishment is the execution of a convicted criminal by the state; this is used as a method of punishment for capital offenses and capital crimes. The execution of criminals and political opponents was used by nearly the entire world; its purpose was to punish crime and to suppress political dissent. Most of the European, Pacific Area states and Canada have abolished capital punishment. However in Latin America not all countries have abolished the use of this punishment, Brazil uses it in exceptional situations, such as treason committed during wartime. The United States and most of the Caribbean still retain this form of punishment. In most places that practice capital punishment today, the death penalty is reserved as punishment for premeditated murder, espionage and treason or as part of military justice. In some countries sexual crimes, such as rape, adultery and sodomy carry the death penalty. In many countries that use the death penalty, drug trafficking is also consider a capital offense.

According to the DPIC, Britain was the influence on America's use of the death penalty more than any other country. When European settlers came to the new world, they brought the practice of capital punishment. The death penalty has existed for as long as there have been criminals. In England, Henry VIII, king of England from 1509 to 1547, was a big fan of the death penalty. During his reign, more than 72,000 people were executed Ð'-- including two of his six wives. By the 1700s, more than 222 crimes were punishable by death in Britain. (Current Events, 2006.) In the United States capital punishment or the execution of a criminal can be trace back to the 1608 with the execution of Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown Colony of Virginia; he was executed for being a spy for Spain. (Death Penalty Information Center, 2007) According to the Supreme Court Debates, capital punishment was common for the next two centuries, even occasionally for such minor offenses as theft. All other crimes carried a mandatory death sentences, this left the judge with no say or any chance for the jury to consider another way of punishment. The execution of criminals was originally carried out in public and they preferred the method of hanging.The execution of a criminal used to be for the public eye until 1834 when Pennsylvania became the first state to move executions to the correctional facilities. There are about 36 methods of capital punishment and over time their uses have varied, in the current time we use lethal injection, electrocution and the gas chamber. The use of these methods also varied state to state.

Around the 1960's people started to say that the death penalty was a violation of the Eighth Amendment for "cruel and unusual punishment". In the case of Furman v. Georgia, Furman argued that capital cases resulted in arbitrary and capricious sentencing. With the Furman decision the Supreme Court set the standard that a punishment would be "cruel and unusual" if it was too severe for the crime, if it was arbitrary, if it offended society's sense of justice, or it if was not more effective than a less severe penalty. (DPIC, 2007) After the decision of Furman v. Georgia, the Court left open the possibility that States could create laws that would pass the Eighth Amendment rules. After this opportunity many states legislatures started to create laws for this and in 1976 the court upheld the constitutionality of several revised death penalty statutes which allowed the death penalty to resume. On January 17, 1977, Utah became the first state to carry out an execution in 10 years and Oklahoma became the first state to lethal injection as a means of execution. There was another case, Coker v. Georgia, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is a grossly disproportionate punishment for the crime of rape of an adult woman. The Court came to this conclusion by considering objective indicia of the nation's attitude toward the death penalty in rape cases. At the time, only a few states allowed for executions of convicted rapists. (Cornell University Law School, 2007)

In 1982 Charles Brooks a convicted criminal was the first person to be executed by lethal injection for committing a murder, his execution took place in Texas. In the following years the government made a lot of changes to the death penalty, for example in 1986 the case of Ford v. Wainwright banned the execution of insane people, in 1988 Thompson v. Oklahoma made the execution of persons fifteen or younger at the time of the crime unconstitutional. There were a few more cases that took place after 1988 and the decisions that came out of them were that the Eighth Amendment did not prohibit the executions of people sixteen or older at the time of the crime; it also said that the execution of people with mental retardation did not violate the Eighth Amendment.

There have been a lot of changes since the colonial times and the early 1990's, not all of the states practiced the death penalty anymore. Out of the 50 states that make the United States of America only 34 states use capital punishment as a method of punishment for convicted criminals. In 1995, the State of New York became the thirty fifth and final state to reinstated capital punishment. Even thought a majority of states have the death penalty only a handful Ð'-- Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Missouri and Virginia account for the vast majority of executions carried out each year.(Supreme Court Debates, 2004) The decision on whether the death penalty is constitutional, unconstitutional or it violates the Eighth Amendment keeps going back and forth. In 2002 the decision of Atkins v. Virginia stated that the execution of people with mental retardation not only violated the Eighth Amendment but it was a cruel and unusual punishment. It also declared that the execution of any person that committed a crime while under the age of eighteen was cruel and unusual and it violated the Eighth Amendment. (DPIC, 2007) In 2003, there were 65 executions, 24 of which occurred in Texas. The total number of death sentences per year also has been in steady decline from 300 in 1998 to 144 in 2003 and 53 in 2006. The Supreme Court recently held that only juries can give out the death sentences and that they need to be informed that life without parole can be an alternative.

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