History of Capital Punishment in the U.S.

A researcher named Watt Espy established that from the colonial era in American history until 1988, there were 16,000 men, women, and children killed by judicial execution in this country. This does not include lynchings. The earliest confirmed execution was in 1608, and this man was shot. Executions have been carried out in many ways, including burnings, a common practice until the nineteenth century. The five preferred methods of execution have been shooting, hanging, electrocution, gassing, and lethal injection. Lethal injection is the new method among the group, dating from the 1980s.

Capital punishment has a long history in the nations of the world, and the recent trend in industrialized nations has been to stop this practice in favor of the punishment of life in prison. The United States has had capital punishment in at least some states since the creation of the Republic, except for a period in the 1970s after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all capital punishment statutes on constitutional grounds. That decision did not mean capital punishment was no longer possible, only that the laws had to be rewritten to assure certain constitutional requirements and guarantees. The public at the present time expresses a desire for the imposition of capital punishment and for swifter execution of criminals, perhaps even if this means undermining certain constitutional rights. This stems largely from a fear of violent crime. Some may believe that capital punishment i

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ow that a black man accused of killing a white person in Georgia is substantially more likely to receive the death penalty than a white person convicted of killing either a white or a black, and 46 percent of the inmates on Georgia's death row are black, with most having killed a white person. The situation is much the same in the 35 other states that have capital punishment. In Maryland, blacks make up nearly 90 percent of the prisoners on death row; in Illinois, 63 percent; and in Pennsylvania, 60 percent. The disparity nationwide is even greater when the race of the murder victim is taken into account: although half of all murder victims in the U.S. are black, 84 percent of the inmates on death row are there for killing a white person. In the last 47 years, only one white person has been executed for the killing of a black person. Out of the 16,000 executions in U.S. history, only 30 cases involved a white convicted of killing a black. In 1986, this issue was raised before the U.S. Supreme Court on an appeal by a Georgia inmate and a Florida inmate in two separate cases. This issue was said to be perhaps the last full-scale assault on the death penalty. In McCleskey v. Georgia, it was argued that the defendant should n

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