Abolishing The Death Penalty: Furman V. Georgia

Capital Punishment, or the death penalty, has gone back and forth between Supreme Court cases for years (Death Penalty). Since 1972, with the case Furman v. Georgia, the legality of the death penalty has been challenged, along with it’s principality and methods. The first recorded use of death as a punishment in America was in 1608 (Reggio), George Kendall of Virginia was executed under the belief that he would betray the British Empire to the Spanish, and the first legal execution occurred in 1622, when Daniel Frank of Virginia was put to death for thievery. Historically, the death penalty was inflicted under crimes like theft, murder, perjury, adultery, rape and statutory rape, buggery and beastiality, arson, blasphemy, and the Duke’s

But no great reformation occurred until 1833. Those who witnessed public executions either reveled in the excitement of the event, or violently rioted in its aftereffects. There were some repulsive executions that led to abolition, such as “In 1853, Wisconsin abolished the death penalty after a gruesome execution in which the victim struggled for five minutes at the end of the rope, and a full eighteen minutes passed before his heart finally quit” (Reggio). In 1930, Eva Dugan was the first female to be executed in Arizona, and her “execution was botched when the hangman misjudged the drop and Mrs. Dugan's head was ripped from her body” (Reggio). But success against capital punishment didn’t see much of any fruition until 1972, when the Supreme Court declared it cruel and unusual in Furman v. Georgia, based on ‘discriminatory sentencing guidelines.’ But capital punishment was brought back to life in the states with the case of Gregg v. Georgia (1976), when newly written state legislations eliminated the discriminatory