Background of the Death Penalty and Furman v. Georgia Capital Punishment or known as the death penalty is a legal process where a person is put to death by the state for committing a crime. The judicial decree is called a death sentence. The actual enforcement is called an execution. Capital punishment in the past has been practiced by societies as punishment for criminals if they have committed a crime, and political or religious dissidents. In the past history, the death sentence was used for torture. They would do executions which were most often public (‘Capital Punishment”, n.d). Public execution was a form of capital punishment that was made for members of that public or society to go and attend the execution of a person or criminal. …show more content…
Georgia, 1972”, n.d). It is the most enduring elements of the American legal system. From colonial time to today, it has been used for punishment for criminal conduct (Claxton, 2011). In 1972, in a case called Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court said that the death penalty was still part of the criminal codes in 40 out of 50 states. Since the opposition of the death penalty did not exist during this case’s decision, the courts decision brought attention to this issue. As time went on, the society hasn’t been doing brutal punishment such as execution or burning people (“Supreme Court Cases: Furman v. Georgia, 1972”, n.d). In 1972, in the state of Georgia, a man named William Henry Furman committed a crime that would fall under the death penalty. William Furman was a poor mentally ill African-American who was on parole already for burglary at the time he broke into William Mickes home in Savannah, Georgia (Swedlow, 2012). It was the middle of the night when resident, William Micke woke up to noises in his house. Micke started to investigate his house when he rolled up on Furman and surprised him. When Furman got surprised he “accidentally” fired a shot (Swedlow, …show more content…
One question was: Would the death penalty be cruel and unusual, if it was given to poor people and minorities? White people committed similar crimes but only got life sentence in prison (“Supreme Court Cases: Furman v. Georgia, 1972”, n.d). If the whites committed similar crimes would they be treated the same, by having the court give them a death sentence or would they be treated differently by having the court given them jail time or a life sentence. Back then they were treated better than the blacks. This had to of violated the Fourteenth Amendment. All these issues led to the arguments for each