The death penalty is the common term applied to the concept of capital punishment. The term ôcapital punishmentö is defined as the taking of a life under the authority of the state for an offense against the law of the state for which the individual subjected to capital punishment has been judged to be guilty (Joynt and Shuchart 40).
A broad support for the death penalty exists among the American population. As a consequence of the high levels of public support for capital punishment, 38 of 53 major jurisdictions (the federal government, the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) have death penalty laws in force. An anachronism in this scenario, however, is that proportionately few people are legally executed in the contemporary United States as a whole than was true in earlier years ù before capital punishment was first ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme court and then reinstated as a constitutional punishment (Joynt and Shuchart 40).
Since the constitutionality of capital punishment was restored by the United States Supreme Court in 1976, in excess of 5,000 persons have been sentenced to death in American courtrooms. Of those sentences, approximately 40 percent have been set aside judicially, leaving nearly 3,000 persons on the so-called death row in American prisons. Since 1976, less than 500 persons have been legally executed in the United States, although the rate of executions is increasing (Joynt and Shuchart 40).
One school of thought holds that having capital punishment laws in the United States is a horrible waste of public and social resources because proportionately so few people are executed. While the basis for that argument is true at the national level, the argument is not as easily supportable at the level of major jurisdictions. A total of 21 of the 38 major jurisdictions with capital punishment laws in force each have executed two or fewer person...