DEATH PENALTY

Death Penalty

Death Penalty

Introduction

Capital punishment, or the death penalty, is the most severe form of criminal punishment: the legal and justified termination of a convicted offender's life as punishment for his or her crime(s). Historically, this has been accomplished by various forms of execution. Offenders have been stoned, bludgeoned, beaten, broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered, eviscerated while alive, buried alive, burned alive, drowned, garroted, beheaded, hanged, shot by firing squad, electrocuted, poisoned by lethal gas, and most currently, poisoned by lethal injection. Executions were carried out in public settings until the 1830s, when they also began to be carried out inside prison boundaries. The last public execution in the United States was conducted on August 14, 1936, in Kentucky. An estimated 20,000 people witnessed that execution.

The purpose and/or goals of capital punishment are threefold. The first goal is to provide retribution, the principle that demands that convicted offenders be made to pay for their crimes; if an individual murders another, the offender must pay for the crime with his or her own life. The second goal of capital punishment is to incapacitate the offender. Incapacitation is the principle that demands that convicted offenders be prevented from committing additional crimes against innocent persons in the community. Imprisonment is the most common form of incapacitation; however, many offenders continue to commit crimes within prison, for example, physical and/or sexual assault and murder of other inmates and prison staff. Some also continue to commit drug offenses and direct gangrelated activities on the streets from inside prison. The death penalty is the only punishment that affords true incapacitation against additional crimes from a given offender.

Presently, in the United States, more than 3,600 male and more than 50 female inmates await execution on death row. Since 1976, of the approximately 22,000 annual convictions for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, only about 300 offenders per year have been sentenced to death for their crimes. However, the number of executions carried out has never exceeded 74 per year. In other words, even though current public opinion is 75% in favor of capital punishment, only 1.5% of the annual murder offenders are sentenced to death. Moreover, a maximum of only 2% of those already on death row have been executed in any given year. Nonetheless, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution requires due process and equal protection (Fourteenth Amendment) and prohibits cruel and unusual punishments (Eighth Amendment). As a result, capital cases are thus held to the highest standards of fairness and careful implementation of procedures.

Death row inmates tend to be poorly educated men and women from low-income backgrounds. Minorities are overrepresented for their percentage of the population, yet Caucasians account for the greatest number of death row inmates and executions. The criminal histories of these inmates have reportedly shown that 66% have prior felony convictions, 9% have prior homicide convictions, and 34% were on probation/parole or in prison at the time of their ...