The Death Penalty
American Civil Liberties Union Briefing Paper Number 8
THE DEATH PENALTY
Since our nation's founding, the government -- colonial, federal and state --
has punished murder and, until recent years, rape with the ultimate sanction:
death. More than 13,000 people have been legally executed since colonial times,
most of them in the early 20th Century. By the 1930s, as many as 150 people
were executed each year. However, public outrage and legal challenges caused
the practice to wane. By 1967, capital punishment had virtually halted in the
United States, pending the outcome of several court challenges.
In 1972, in _Furman v. Georgia_, the Supreme Court invalidated hundreds of
scheduled executions, declaring that then existing state laws were applied in an
"arbitrary and capricious" manner and, thus, violated the Eighth Amendment's
prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and the Fourteenth Amendment's
guarantees of equal protection of......
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Approximate Word Count: 1965
Approximate Pages: 8 (260 words per double-spaced page) |