Capital Punishment :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Each year there about 250 people added to death row and only 35 of them are even executed. The death penalty is the harshest form of punishment actually enforced by the United States government. Once the jury has convicted a criminal offense they go to the second part of the trial, the punishment part. If then the jury considers the death penalty, 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 period between 1972 to ‘76, capital punishment was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. There are many reasons for why they thought that. The death penalty was looked at a cruel and unusual punishment under the eighth amendment. This decision was switched when a new method of execution was formed. Capital punishment is a difficult issue and there are many opinions as there are people on this earth.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Since the beginning of the United States there has been over 13,000 legal executions. Texas has executed the most people since the death penalty has been reinstated in 1976. There are only about 30-60 prisoners killed yearly. â€Å"The Bible requires the death penalty for a wide variety of crimes, including sex before marriage, adultery, homosexual behavior, doing work on Saturday, and murder. It even calls for some criminals to be tortured to death by burning them alive†(SOURCE 1). Some of the things stated in the last quote were a little morbid, and made me question in what I truly believe in. John Stuart Mill once stated, â€Å" When there has been brought home to any one, by conclusive evidence, the greatest crime known to law; and when the attendant circumstances suggest no palliation of guilt, no hope that the culprit may even yet not be unworthy to live among mankind, nothing to make it probable that the crime was an exception to general character rather than a consequence of it, then I confess it appears to me that to deprive the criminal of the life which he has proved himself to be unworthy--solemnly to blot him out from the fellowship of mankind and from the catalogue of the living-- is the most appropriate as it is certainly the most impressive, mode in which society can attach to so great a crime the penal consequences which for the security of life it is indispensable to annex to it†, this was stated before Parliament on April 21, 1868. I find that in this passage a lot of good is said.