The death penalty, a constant cause for acrimonious dispute, has existed from the origins of Ancient Greece to the 21st century, and has unfortunately entered the United States even before the Revolutionary War. Society has seen capital punishment ravage the lands during the original thirteen colonies in events like the Salem Witch Trials, which brought light to drowning and hanging of innocent individuals. In many cases, the death penalty engendered great anger among politicians and regular citizens alike for the genuine morality of the action. Capital punishment is the action of sentencing an individual to death for capital offenses- i.e espionage, treason, and death resulting from aircraft hijacking; however, most capital offenses revolve around murder, which involves "murder committed during a drug-related drive-by shooting, murder during a kidnapping, murder for hire, and genocide." The death penalty can be prescribed by Congress or any state legislature; according to the Supreme Court, the death penalty is not a per se violation of the Eighth Amendment- a ban on cruel and unusual punishments- but the Eighth Amendment can affect …show more content…
In the landmark case of Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584, (1977), the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty could not apply to an adult woman's rape because of proportionality issues; therefore the Court concluded that an objective indicia must exist in the nation's attitude toward rape cases. At the time, few states applied the death penalty toward rapists. Twenty-one years later, in Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407, (2008), the Supreme Court extended its ruling in Coker, by stating that in cases of child rape, the death penalty is not applicable if the child lives. Since only six states in the nation had applied the death penalty as a necessary sentence against child rape, the Supreme Court had held a consensus that the punishment was