Capital Punishment :: essays research papers

Each year there about 250 people added to death row and only 35 of them areeven executed. The death penalty is the harshest form of penalty actually enforced bythe United States government. Once the jury has convicted a felonious offense they go tothe second part of the trial, the punishment part. If then(prenominal) the jury considers the deathpenalty, then the judge agrees that the criminal will have to face a form of execution.Lethal injection is the most widely used by todays death row criminals. For a periodbetween 1972 to 76, capital punishment was govern unconstitutional by the SupremeCourt. There are more reasons for why they thought that. The death penalty was lookedat a cruel and unusual punishment under the eighth amendment. This decision wasswitched when a new method of execution was formed. Capital punishment is a difficultissue and there are many opinions as there are people on this earth.Since the beginning of the United States there has been over 13,000 legalex ecutions. Texas has executed the most people since the death penalty has beenreinstated in 1976. There are only about 30-60 prisoners killed yearly. The Bible requiresthe death penalty for a wide variety of crimes, including sex before marriage, adultery,homosexual behavior, doing cook on Saturday, and murder. It even calls for somecriminals to be tortured to death by burning them alive(SOURCE 1). Some of the thingsstated in the last quote were a little morbid, and made me question in what I truly believein. John Stuart Mill once stated, When there has been brought home to any one, by definitive evidence, the greatest crime known to law and when the attendantcircumstances suggest no palliation of guilt, no hope that the culprit may even moreover not beunworthy to live among mankind, nothing to make it probable that the crime was anexception to general character rather than a consequence of it, then I confess it appears tome that to deprive the criminal of the purport which he ha s proved himself to beunworthy--solemnly to blot him out from the fellowship of mankind and from thecatalogue of the living-- is the most remove as it is certainly the most impressive,mode in which society can attach to so great a crime the penal consequences which for thesecurity of life it is indispensable to annex to it, this was stated before Parliament on April21, 1868. I find that in this passage a lot of good is said.