Death Penalty in America

The United States is on an

execution rampage. Since capital

punishment was reinstated by

the Supreme Court in the 1976

Gregg v. Georgia decision, more

than 525 men and women have

been put to death by the state.

More than 150 of these

executions have taken place

since 1996. 3,500 people are on

death row today, awaiting their

turn with thecapital punishment has existed

throughout most of the course

of our nation’s history. By the

mid-1960s, however, public

opposition to the death penalty

had reached an all-time high, and the

practice was banned by the Supreme

Court in the 1972 Furman v. Georgia

decision. The Court held that state death

penalty statutes were devoid of any

standards, and that they therefore gave too

much discretion to individual judges and

juries to exact the ultimate punishment.

Soon after the Furman decision, states

began passing new laws that provided

sentencing guidelines for juries. The

Supreme Court was given another

The Essay on Death Penalty Punishment Capitol Court

DEATH PENALTY The courts positions of the death penalty has changed over the years. For centuries societies have used death as the ultimate penalty for crime. In the 1960's, the court ruled against the death penalty as a "cruel and unusual punishment", which was forbidden by the eighth amendment of the Constitution. By the 1990's the death penalty was again in wide use supported by the court and ...

opportunity to address the issue of capital

punishment in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia,

and it ruled that “the punishment of death

does not invariably violate the

Constitution.” Since this ruling, capital

punishment rates have grown exponentially

in the United States.

In 1994, the Federal death penalty Act

authorized capital punishment for more than

60 offenses, including some crimes that do not

involve murder. Moreover, the 1996 Anti-

Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty

Act created new barriers to effective federal

review of constitutional claims in capital

cases. Congress and many states have also

slashed funding for most of the legal

representation death row inmates formerly

received from death penalty resource centers.

Capital punishment, the ultimate denial of

civil liberties, is a costly, irreversible and

barbaric practice, the epitome of cruel and

unusual punishment. It does not deter

crime, and the way it is implemented is

grotesquely unfair.

Regardless of one’s viewpoint about the

morality or constitutionality of the death

penalty, most people would agree that if we

are going to continue executing people in

the U.S., we should be doing it fairly and

rationally. However, three factors,

unrelated to the crime itself, greatly

influence who gets executed and who does

not: poverty, race and geography.

Lethal Injection for the Poor — The

American Bar Association and many

scholars have found that what most often

determines whether or not a death

sentence is handed down is not the facts of

the crime, but the quality of the legal

representation. The overwhelming

majority of death row inmates receive

substandard legal representation at trial.

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The retribution rational for punishment is like the social contract theory. This simply means that when an individual offender must be punished its because he/she deserves it. There are three types of retribution the first one is negative retribution, which means one who is not guilty should not be punish for crime. The second is positive retribution, which demands that one who is guilty should be ...

Almost all capital-crime defendants are

indigent when arrested, and are generally

represented by court-appointed lawyers,

who are inexperienced and underpaid. The

National Law Journal, reviewing capital

cases in six Southern states, reported that

defense lawyers are often “ill-trained,

unprepared… [and] grossly underpaid.”

Defending a capital case is timeconsuming,

taking about 700-1000 hours.

In some jurisdictions the hourly rates for

appointed attorneys in capital cases are less

than the minimum wage, and usually much

less than the lawyer’s hourly expenses.

Moreover, courts often authorize

inadequate funds for investigation and

experts — or refuse to do so altogether.

This is in the face of the almost limitless

such funding for the prosecution. Wealthy

people who can hire their own counsel are

generally spared the death penalty, no

matter how heinous their crimes. Poor

people do not have the same opportunity

to buy their lives.

Racial Bias Permeates the System —

Death row in the U.S. has always held a

disproportionately large population of

people of color relative to the general

population. Whereas African Americans

constitute 12% of the U.S. population,

they are 35% of those on death row; 9%

are Native American, Latino or Asian.

The most important factor in levying the

death penalty, however, is the race of the

victim. (Those who kill a white person are

more likely to receive the death penalty

than those who kill a black person.)

A 1998 report by the Death Penalty

Information Center summarizes the

findings of several scholars which illustrate

this point. In 96% of the studies

examining the relationship between race

and the death penalty there was a pattern

of race-of-victim or race-of-defendant

discrimination, or both.

The report also reveals a consistent trend

indicating race-of-victim discrimination.

For example, in Florida, in

comparable cases, “a

defendant’s odds of receiving a

death sentence are 4.8 times

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higher if the victim was white

than if the victim was black. In

Illinois the multiplier is 4, in

Oklahoma it is 4.3, in North

Carolina, 4.4, and in

Mississippi, it is 5.5.”

The state of Kentucky presents

a particularly outrageous

example of race-of-victim

discrimination: despite the fact

that 1,000 African Americans

have been murdered there since

the 1975 reinstitution of the

death penalty in that state, as of spring

1999, all of the state’s 39 death row

inmates were sentenced for murdering a

white victim; none were there for

murdering an African American.

Several studies show the effects of outright

racial discrimination. One recent example,

a 1998 University of Iowa study of

sentencing in Philadelphia, showed that

the odds of receiving a death sentence are

nearly 3.9 times greater if the defendant is

African American.

These patterns of racial disparities are

partly explained by the fact that the

nation’s prosecutors, who make the

threshold decision about whether or not to

seek the death penalty are almost

exclusively white men. Of the district

attorneys in U.S. counties using capital

punishment, 98% are white, and only 1%

are African American. New York State has

only one African American district attorney.

Where You Live Determines Whether You

Die — Whether someone convicted of a

capital crime receives a death sentence

depends greatly on the state or county in

which the trial and conviction takes place.

In some states, a death sentence is rare.

Connecticut had five people on death row

in 1999; Kansas, only two. Southern states,

particularly Texas (443 death row inmates

in 1999), hand down significantly more

death sentences than those in the rest of

the country. California, the state with the

largest penal system, had 513 inmates on

death row in the spring of 1999. Such

state-to-state disparities exist because

death penalty statutes are a patchwork of

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Different factions of sociologists depict men. Functionalists suggest that a division of labor originally arose between man and women because of the woman’s role in reproduction. By virtue of their larger size and greater muscular strength, men were assigned hunting and defense tasks. Conflict theorists reject functionalist arguments as simply offering a rationale for male dominance. They contend ...

disparate standards, rules and practices and

the consequence is the difference between

life and death. Furthermore, some

prosecutors are more zealous in seeking the

death penalty than others – particularly if

they are running for re-election.