Capitol Punishment Essay

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Capital Punishment

By: S.B.

E-mail: shanka20@hotmail.com

Capital Punishment – An Overview “The question with which we must deal is

not whether a substantial proportion of American citizens would today, if

polled, opine that capital punishment is barbarously cruel, but whether they

would find it to be so in light of all information presently available.”- Justice

Thurgood Marshall Imagine a man who commits murder once, is given a

fifteen-year jail sentence and is returned to the streets where he kills again.

He is imprisoned again only to be released. This could happen since almost

one in ten death row inmates has been convicted of murder at least once.

That means that some death row inmates have been given more than one

chance to rehabilitate in prison and continue to commit violent crimes. Should

the United States justice system continue to let violent criminals back on the

streets where they are likely to commit murder again? Capital punishment is

one of the oldest forms of punishment in the world. Most societies have

considered it a fair punishment for severe crimes. It is even mentioned as an

appropriate punishment in the Bible. American colonists used capital

punishment before the United States was a country, and most states use it

today. Currently, however, there is a great deal of controversy surrounding

the death penalty. Capital cases are long and expensive, and there is no proof

as to whether capital punishment deters crime. For these reasons total

abolition may be the best way to resolve the capital punishment controversy.

If the laws concerning capital punishment were modified, however, capital

punishment could become much cheaper, and possibly a lot more effective. –

Steve Brinker Capital Punishment: Give It A Chance Since the beginning of

man, people have been put to death. Capital punishment has been used all

over the world as a means of punishing people for their crimes. Here in

America, people are usually given a trial for their crime, judged upon by the

jury and judge, and then finally decided upon their final verdict. If the crime is

serious enough, the person is sent to spend time on death row in a

maximum-security prison. The judge then sets a date when the person is to

be executed. The person has an opportunity to appeal, which must be

granted by the governor in the state in which the person is imprisoned. If the

person is pardoned, then they will set another date for execution, or they will

spend the rest of their lives on death row. If the pardon is denied, then the

person will be sent to die on the scheduled day. Now I would like to give you

a few examples of famous, and not so famous cases of people who were

sentenced to be executed: · Thomas More: was executed in the 1700s for

being a “traitor” to the Roman Catholic Church in England. According to the

laws of his time…. The accused man had no “rights” in the contemporary

sense. There was no presumption of innocence, and the prisoner was given

no opportunity to call witnesses in his defense… Thomas More was

convicted of being contempt, and not following the rules of the church. He

was sentenced to death by having his head cut off with an axe. After his

death, the flesh was boiled off of his head, it was then impaled upon a pole

raised above the London Bridge. · Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: This is

probably one of the most famous cases of espionage in American History.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted for transmitting Atomic Military

Secrets to the U.S.S.R., and were labeled Communist Spies. This case was

ended with a double death sentence, they were both sent to die in the electric

chair at Sing Sing Prison. · George Stinney Jr.: was the youngest person to be

legally executed in the United States in the 20th Century. In 1944, George

Stinney Jr., a 14 year old black male, was convicted of stabbing two young

white females with railroad spikes in the head. Despite his age, he was

convicted in less than 90 days after the murders. He was electrocuted in

Central Correctional institution in Columbia, S.C. · Andrew Lavern Smith:

On December 18, 1998, a man by the name of Andrew Smith became the

500th execution in the United States since capital punishment became

reinstated in 1976. He was lethally injected in Columbia, S.C. He had been

convicted for murdering an elderly couple after they refused to let him borrow

their car. · Joshua Phillips: On the local standpoint, Joshua Phillips was

convicted for the murder of Maddie Clifton here in Jacksonville. Yet,

because of his age, 14 at the time of the murder, he was sentenced to life at

Wakulla Correctional Institution, instead of death, which is usually given for

pre-meditated murder in the 1st degree. Why was he sentenced to die like

George Stinney Jr.? That question is in the open. These are only a few

examples of the thousands of people who have been executed over time of

man. It would be nearly impossible to sit and write all the cases. I personally

believe that capital punishment is a necessity in our society. Without it, our

prisons would be way overcrowded, and who knows? These people could

once again possibly escape back into the public, then we would have to live

our lives in fear. A Brief History of Execution By Nicholas McCorkle The

practice of execution is as old as civilization itself. From ancient Sumeria to

modern executions by lethal injection, capital punishment has been practiced

by almost every society in the world. Each culture has it’s own rites and

rituals, but the feeling of a justified retribution is held by almost every ethnic

and civil group in the world. Yet the debate over its efficacy and morality

continues unabated to this day. The history of capital punishment begins with

the translations of Hammurabi’s Code, the oldest legal document ever

discovered. While the precise date of Hammurabi's Code of Laws is

disputed by scholars, it is generally believed to have been written between the

second year of his reign, circa 1727 BCE, and the end of his reign, circa

1780 BCE, predating the Hebrew "Ten Commandments" by about 500

years. Perhaps the single most striking feature of Hammurabi's Code is its

commitment to protection of the weak from being brutalized by the strong.

He believed that he had been ordained by his gods Anu (God of the Sky)

and Bel (The Lord of Heaven and Earth, the God of Destiny) to establish the

rule of law and justice over his people. It is believed by many historians, that

the practice of execution even predates the code. The laws were merely

administered by an assembly of elders and the acts of execution were usually

performed by the victim’s family in cases of murder, rape, and other

atrocities. The concept of an “eye for an eye ” or post mortem retribution

was used as justification. Basically, execution began as an act of revenge.

From there, the death penalty continued to evolve. We find references to

execution in the works of Charles Dickens, Voltaire, and Nathaniel

Hawthorne. The severity of the laws changed over the course of history,

providing for other alternatives, but the need for retribution remained. With

the expansion of the British Empire to the New World execution in the

respect that we think of it today was introduced to North America. The first

recorded incident of a man being put to death in the territory now known as

the United States of America was of Daniel Frank, put to death in 1622 in

the Colony of Virginia for the crime of theft. Since then the death penalty has

almost always been a feature of the criminal justice system, first in the

American colonies and then, after independence, in the U.S. It was upheld

throughout the birth of the burgeoning nation and continued into the expansion

west. During the Civil War, most death sentences were provided for

deserters and traitors. As the United States continued to grow, many western

territories, with the lack of dedicated police forces, looked to vigilante groups

to provide justice to criminals. This usually resulted in the accused being hung,

without trial or jury. The United States did not begin to keep regular statistics

on the death penalty until 1930. From 1930, the first year for which statistics

are readily available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, to 1967, 3,859

persons were executed under civil (that is, nonmilitary) jurisdiction in the

United States. The vast majority of those executed were men; 32 women

were executed from 1930 to 1967. Three out of five executions during that

period took place in the southern U.S. The state of Georgia had the highest

number of executions during the period, totaling 366 -- more than nine

percent of the national total. Texas followed with 297 executions; New York

with 329; California with 292; and North Caroline with 263. Most executions

-- 3,334 of 3,859 -- were for the crime of murder; 455 prisoners (12%) --

ninety percent of them black -- were executed for rape; 70 prisoners were

executed for other offenses. By the end of the 1960s, all but 10 states had

laws authorizing capital punishment, but strong pressure by forces opposed to

the death penalty resulted in an unofficial moratorium on executions for

several years, with the last execution during this period taking place in 1967.

Prior to this, an average of 130 executions per year occurred. Legal

challenges to the death penalty culminated in a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court

decision Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 153 (1972), which struck down

federal and state capital punishment laws permitting wide discretion in the

application of the death penalty. The majority ruled that they constituted cruel

and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S.

Constitution and the due process guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Only two of the justices concurring in the decision declared capital

punishment to be unconstitutional in all instances, however; other

concurrences focused on the abitrariness of the application of capital

punishment, including the appearance of racial bias against black defendants.

In all, nine separate opinions -- five invalidating existing laws and four arguing

for their retention -- were written by the nine Supreme Court justices spelling

out their different views on what constituted the "cruel and unusual

punishment" prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. More than 600 death row

inmates who had been sentenced to death between 1967 and 1972 had their

death sentences lifted as a result of Furman, but the numbers quickly began to

build up again as states enacted revised legislation tailored to satisfy the

Supreme Court's objections to arbitrary imposition of death sentences. The

first execution under the new death penalty laws took place on January 17,

1977, when convicted murdered Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad

in Utah. Gilmore's was the first execution in the United States since 1967.

Since the 1976 Gregg decision upholding the constitutionality of Georgia's

death penalty law, numerous states have reinstated capital punishment in their

statutes. The most recent state to enact a death penalty law was New York

in 1995. As of January 1998, 38 states and the federal government have

capital punishment laws in effect. Alaska, eleven other states Hawaii, Iowa,

Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island,

Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin -- and the District of Columbia do

not have a death penalty. Racial Disparities in Capital Sentencing By

Monique Small One argument that opponents of capital punishment make is

that it is meted out unfairly. They argue two main points: 1) that minorities,

especially blacks, are substantially over-represented on death row and 2) the

murders of minorities are not considered capital cases with even comparable

frequency to the murders of whites. In this section I will address each of these

points beginning with the first. When it comes to the question of

representation on death row, it is obvious to almost anyone that blacks are

severely over-represented. African-Americans total approximately 12

percent of the population of America, while they make up approximately 39

...

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