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Evolution Of Death Penalty Essay

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The Evolution of the Death Penalty Ancient justice systems, created as far back as the eighteenth century B.C.E., used the death penalty as punishment for a majority of the crimes. The ancient methods of execution, such as immolation and crucifixion, involved slow, painful deaths. As time went on, quicker and more cost-efficient methods were sought after. These included hanging and variations of beheading, which were easy to perform and cheap. Modern-day death penalty includes relatively more moral and painless options; today, the majority of nations strive to use the most humane way of sending inmates to their deaths. The five methods used today in the U.S. are lethal injection, electrocution, firing squad, gas chamber, and hanging. The death …show more content…

A firing squad is usually composed of five or more trained military personnel. There are multiple gunman in play so that no one man is responsible for taking another human’s life; the blame of the killings is dispersed throughout the firing squad. Additionally, they are all instructed to fire simultaneously in order to prevent any single man from delivering the fatal shot, in turn placing the blame on him/her for the killing. The condemned inmate is bound from movement, whether it is to be tied to a pole or strapped to a chair. The person is also blindfolded or hooded in order to dehumanize him or her, in turn making pulling the trigger on them easier and also to prevent the person from having to witness their own deaths. The person would be surrounded by sandbags, to absorb the blood. A doctor then comes in and locates the inmate’s heart with a stethoscope, and proceeds to place a target of where the heart is. Then, when everything is prepared, it is time to start the shooting. The Utah executioners use .30 Winchester semi-automatic rifles in their executions. It is common for one of the five rifles to be filled with blanks (Edwards). The targeted person dies—evidently—from several gunshot wounds or, if the person does not instantly die from GSWs, bleeding to

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Hanging was the main method of execution in America until the electric chair was invented in 1890. Then came gas chambers and lethal injection in the 1920s and 1970s respectively. There were downsides to all of these methods of execution including decapitation for hanging, heads catching on fire with the electric chair, and expenses for lethal injection. The Supreme Court halted all executions for four years in 1972 because of an abolitionist group protesting possibly discriminatory convictions. After this, lethal injection was invented and adopted by many U.S. states.

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