THE DEATH PENALTY
Britain influenced America's use of the death penalty more than any other country. When European settlers came to the new world, they brought with them the practice of capital punishment.
The first recorded execution in the new colonies was that of Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608. Kendall was executed for being a spy for Spain.
The United States ranks number 4 in the world when looking at the number of executions it performs each year (ranked above it are China, Iran, and Vietnam).
In the United States, the issue of capital punishment is largely left up to the individual states; the federal government reserves the right to perform executions, but does so extremely infrequently. Twelve states have legally abolished the death penalty.
Persons who are mentally retarded are described as having "significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive......
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