Capital Punishment Essay -- Death Penalty

Capital Punishment is the legal infliction of the death penalty. In the United States capital punishment is legal in thirty-nine of the fifty states. Beginning in 1973, prison populations began an inevitable growth. There were 204,211 inmates in 1973, and by 1977 the number of prisoners had grown to 285,456, which later grew to 315,974 in 1980. By 1976, it was clear that the death penalty had to be reinstated. America’s experiment with capital punishment has resulted in a total of 944 executions, fifty-nine of which took place in 2003. Every year about 15,000 killers are charged and only about 300 wind up on death row. The death row population is constantly increasing. It is now more than 3,000. Because of constant appeals, it takes a person on death row typically between five to eight years to finally get executed. To kill all the prisoners on death row, it is estimated that it would take two executions a day for seven years. Crimes such as aiding in suicide, causing a boat collision resulting in death, forced marriage, procuring an abortion resulting in the death of the mother, espionage, castrating another, rape, homicide, child molesting resulting in death and conspiracy to kidnap for ransom among many others are, in some states, crimes that are punishable by death. What the law permits, however, is not always used by the courts or the executive authorities. Most executions are a result of a murder or rape, and a small number for robbery, kidnapping, burglary, aggravated assault and espionage. In the US, the death penalty is currently authorized in one of five ways: hanging, which has been the traditional method of execution throughout the English-speaking world; electrocution, which was introduced by New York S... ...ting crimes. A sweeping sixty percent don’t think that vengeance is a legitimate reason for killing a murderer. Many court decisions of the 1980s and early 1990s have lowered bars to executions. In 1986 the Court ruled that opponents of executions may be barred from juries in murder cases. The following year the Court ruled that the law may be applied to accomplices in crimes that led to murder, then rejected a challenge to capital punishment based on statistics that indicated racial bias in sentencing. In separate decisions in 1989 the Court decided that the death penalty could be applied to those who were mentally retarded or who were underage, but at least 16, at the time of the murder. In the early 1990s the trend of Supreme Court rulings was to cut back on the appeals that Death Row inmates could make to the federal courts. Capital Punishment Essay -- Death Penalty Capital Punishment is the legal infliction of the death penalty. In the United States capital punishment is legal in thirty-nine of the fifty states. Beginning in 1973, prison populations began an inevitable growth. There were 204,211 inmates in 1973, and by 1977 the number of prisoners had grown to 285,456, which later grew to 315,974 in 1980. By 1976, it was clear that the death penalty had to be reinstated. America’s experiment with capital punishment has resulted in a total of 944 executions, fifty-nine of which took place in 2003. Every year about 15,000 killers are charged and only about 300 wind up on death row. The death row population is constantly increasing. It is now more than 3,000. Because of constant appeals, it takes a person on death row typically between five to eight years to finally get executed. To kill all the prisoners on death row, it is estimated that it would take two executions a day for seven years. Crimes such as aiding in suicide, causing a boat collision resulting in death, forced marriage, procuring an abortion resulting in the death of the mother, espionage, castrating another, rape, homicide, child molesting resulting in death and conspiracy to kidnap for ransom among many others are, in some states, crimes that are punishable by death. What the law permits, however, is not always used by the courts or the executive authorities. Most executions are a result of a murder or rape, and a small number for robbery, kidnapping, burglary, aggravated assault and espionage. In the US, the death penalty is currently authorized in one of five ways: hanging, which has been the traditional method of execution throughout the English-speaking world; electrocution, which was introduced by New York S... ...ting crimes. A sweeping sixty percent don’t think that vengeance is a legitimate reason for killing a murderer. Many court decisions of the 1980s and early 1990s have lowered bars to executions. In 1986 the Court ruled that opponents of executions may be barred from juries in murder cases. The following year the Court ruled that the law may be applied to accomplices in crimes that led to murder, then rejected a challenge to capital punishment based on statistics that indicated racial bias in sentencing. In separate decisions in 1989 the Court decided that the death penalty could be applied to those who were mentally retarded or who were underage, but at least 16, at the time of the murder. In the early 1990s the trend of Supreme Court rulings was to cut back on the appeals that Death Row inmates could make to the federal courts.