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Definition Essay: Death Penalty In The United States

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Death Penalty: Definition Essay
Yolanda Burns
Lakeland University

Texas is the first state for capital punishment with executing five hundred people as of
The death penalty is when a defendant has been sentenced to death by the Supreme Court for a committing murder or any other violent crime. The United States currently use lethal injection but some states still allow electrocution, firing squad, Hanging and lethal gas. In Ga (2001 and Nebraska (2008) the Supreme Court ruled that death by electrocution was unconstitutional because the punishment was cruel and unusual. Since the death penalty has been reinstated, in 1976 some states passed a new law allowing death as a penalty for the rape of a child LOUISIANA vs KENNEDY (50-KA-1981, MAY 22,2007.) the decision was overturned and held that it would be unconstitutional to sentence someone that a incident did not involve death to the victim. Currently 31 states have the …show more content…

399 (1986) that executing an insane person is unconstitutional unless their mental competency is restored. Many states have debated if sentencing a Juvenile to death is a violation of their Eighth Amendment right for cruel and unusual punishment. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty twenty-two juvenile’s offenders have been put to death but not until they reached eighteen. Most commonly if a juvenile that committed felony murder of a child or an adult they are waived to adult court.
The debate over the effectiveness of the death penalty seems to always arise whether its effectiveness deter crime or it is a violation of a person rights. A recent study done by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology reports that 88% of top criminologist do not believe the death penalty deters homicides based on the National Research Council of the National Academies. The report found three flaws in the study.
• The study did not factor in the effectiveness of capital

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Supreme Court heard and ruled 7 to 2 decision it was unconstitutional to impose a death punishment on someone for rape. The court reasoned that punishments violate the Eighth Amendment of the are “excessive in relation to the crime committed”, that determination about excessiveness are properly informed by the “country’s present Judgement” and that the Georgia law could not survive this type of inquiry because no other state subjected persons convicted of the rape of an adult woman to execution. Moreover the Court explained the Eighth Amendment bars not only those punishments that are “barbaric” but also those that are “excessive” and unconstitutional if it makes no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment and hence is nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering, or is grossly out of proportion to the severity of the crime (pp. 433 U.S. 591-592). ‘The death is disproportionate penalty for rape is strongly indicated by the objective evidence of present public judgement, as represented by the attitude of state legislatures and sentencing juries, concerning the acceptability of such a penalty, it only State authorizing the death sentence, it appearing that Georgia is currently the only state authorizing the death sentence for rape of an adult woman, that it is authorized for rape in only two other states, but only when the victim is a child, and that in vast majority of rape convictions in Georgia

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