Death Penalty in the US

To understand the impact of the death penalty on African-Americans in recent years it is necessary to examine the structure of capital punishment that has emerged in recent American history, which in significant part has organized itself around the impact of racism on civil society. Historically, nonwhites were likely to receive death-penalty sentences and were sentenced in numbers out of proportion to their population (Clark, 1970, p. 335). In particular, nonwhites convicted of raping whites were most likely to be executed. Documentation of unfair application appears to have been largely responsible for the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 1972 to declare the death penalty unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment, under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments state laws for sentencing capital defendants (Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238). Capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, based on Supreme Court majority rulings on constitutionality of laws rewritten to conform to Furman. Since that time, 34 states h

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it is necessary to run only one of these risks." The findings of the Liebman study were, however, challenged by Latzer and Cauthen (2000) on the basis of a research method flawed by the collapsing of death-penalty-mitigated sentences and proof of innocence into a single category. In any case, there is evidence that some philosophical rethinking of capital punishment is under way in the U.S. Liebman, et al. (2000, pp. 5ff), cite a variety of initiatives in individual states that have had the effect of limiting or at least querying capital punishment: an executive-order moratorium on capital punishment in Illinois pending further study of the issue; a similar legislative order in Nebraska, passed over the governor's veto; bills meant to improve capital prisoners' access to worthy defense and DNA evidence. Death-penalty statistics indicate that 38 of the 50 states have so-called "capital statutes" (U.S. Dept. of Justice, 2001). However, in January 2000, in the wake of multiple reports of death-row-inmate exoneration of capital crimes due to evidence provided by DNA testing, the governor of Illinois declared a moratorium on executions until the reliability of capital-crime conviction evidence could be guaranteed (Johnson, 2000). Mo
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2092
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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