Capital Punishment

History

Capital punishment came to the United States in the seventeenth century during the colonial period. A major influence on capital punishment law in the United States was English law, which recognized eight major capital offenses: treason, petty treason, murder, larceny, robbery, burglary, rape, and arson (Bedau 1997). Throughout America's history, capital punishment has usually been reserved for the crime of murder. (One notable exception occurred primarily in the South after the Civil War, where the crime of rape—especially if the offender was black and the victim was white—was often punished by death.)

In 1793, Pennsylvania was the first jurisdiction to distinguish between different degrees of murder, with capital punishment being reserved for only first-degree murder, and only the most heinous offenders. During the nineteenth century, there was a trend away from mandatory death sentences and toward giving juries sentencing discretion—options for alternative punishments to the death penalty, such as life imprisonment. An abolitionist movement began in the United States early in the twentieth century and resulted in the repeal of death penalty statutes in nine states. Quakers, Unitarians, and other liberal Christians headed this movement (Bedau 1997); it ended abruptly as the result of a dramatic increase in crime during the 1920s and 1930s, and never fully resumed.

The electric chair at Sing Sing Prison, 1940.

© Bettmann/Corbis; used with permission.

Executions reached a high point in American history during the 1930s and 1940s (Bedau 1997), after which there was a revival of the abolitionist movement in the 1950s through the 1970s: Executions began to decline, and there was an increase in the amount of time that inmates served on death rows prior to execution. In a landmark decision in 1972, Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that the imposition of the death penalty violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments and constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The Court's 5 to 4 decision, expressed in five separate majority opinions, was variably based on the arbitrary, discriminatory, infrequent, and “morally unacceptable” nature of capital punishment. Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, new state death penalty statutes were upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court because they addressed the procedural problems identified in Furman. Two main changes made to state and federal death penalty statutes were the implementation of bifurcated proceedings (a guilt or innocence phase followed by a penalty phase) and the elucidation of aggravating and mitigating factors designed to guide jury decision making. New York was the first state to end public executions in 1835. Currently, no states allow for public executions and there is strict control over who may observe an execution.

A Continuing Controversy

The debate for and against capital punishment centers on its ability to fulfill the objectives of punishment: retribution, deterrence, and incapacitation. Proponents of capital punishment claim that since the death penalty is the most severe sentence possible, it is the most effective sanction in achieving these goals.

...