In , the Supreme Court moved away from abolition, holding that "the punishment of death does not invariably violate the Constitution. Subsequently 38 state legislatures and the Federal government enacted death penalty statutes patterned after those the Court upheld in Gregg. Congress also enacted and expanded federal death penalty statutes for peacetime espionage by military personnel and for a vast range of categories of murder.
Executions resumed in Since then, states have developed a range of processes to ensure that mentally retarded individuals are not executed. Many have elected to hold proceedings prior to the merits trial, many with juries, to determine whether an accused is mentally retarded.
In , the Supreme Court held that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution forbid imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed, resulting in commutation of death sentences to life for dozens of individuals across the country.
As of August , over 3, men and women are under a death sentence and more than 1, men, women and children at the time of the crime have been executed since Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Gregg v. Georgia , et al, the ACLU continues to oppose capital punishment on moral, practical, and constitutional grounds:. Capital punishment is cruel and unusual.
It is cruel because it is a relic of the earliest days of penology, when slavery, branding, and other corporal punishments were commonplace. Like those barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society. It is unusual because only the United States of all the western industrialized nations engages in this punishment. It is also unusual because only a random sampling of convicted murderers in the United States receive a sentence of death.
Capital punishment denies due process of law. Its imposition is often arbitrary, and always irrevocable — forever depriving an individual of the opportunity to benefit from new evidence or new laws that might warrant the reversal of a conviction, or the setting aside of a death sentence. The death penalty violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. It is applied randomly — and discriminatorily.
It is imposed disproportionately upon those whose victims are white, offenders who are people of color, and on those who are poor and uneducated and concentrated in certain geographic regions of the country. The death penalty is not a viable form of crime control. When police chiefs were asked to rank the factors that, in their judgment, reduce the rate of violent crime, they mentioned curbing drug use and putting more officers on the street, longer sentences and gun control.
They ranked the death penalty as least effective. Politicians who preach the desirability of executions as a method of crime control deceive the public and mask their own failure to identify and confront the true causes of crime. Capital punishment wastes limited resources. It squanders the time and energy of courts, prosecuting attorneys, defense counsel, juries, and courtroom and law enforcement personnel. It unduly burdens the criminal justice system, and it is thus counterproductive as an instrument for society's control of violent crime.
Limited funds that could be used to prevent and solve crime and provide education and jobs are spent on capital punishment. Opposing the death penalty does not indicate a lack of sympathy for murder victims. On the contrary, murder demonstrates a lack of respect for human life. Because life is precious and death irrevocable, murder is abhorrent, and a policy of state-authorized killings is immoral.
It epitomizes the tragic inefficacy and brutality of violence, rather than reason, as the solution to difficult social problems. Many murder victims do not support state-sponsored violence to avenge the death of their loved one. Sadly, these victims have often been marginalized by politicians and prosecutors, who would rather publicize the opinions of pro-death penalty family members.
Changes in death sentencing have proved to be largely cosmetic. The defects in death-penalty laws, conceded by the Supreme Court in the early s, have not been appreciably altered by the shift from unrestrained discretion to "guided discretion. A society that respects life does not deliberately kill human beings. An execution is a violent public spectacle of official homicide, and one that endorses killing to solve social problems — the worst possible example to set for the citizenry, and especially children.
Governments worldwide have often attempted to justify their lethal fury by extolling the purported benefits that such killing would bring to the rest of society. The benefits of capital punishment are illusory, but the bloodshed and the resulting destruction of community decency are real. Deterrence is a function not only of a punishment's severity, but also of its certainty and frequency.
The argument most often cited in support of capital punishment is that the threat of execution influences criminal behavior more effectively than imprisonment does.
As plausible as this claim may sound, in actuality the death penalty fails as a deterrent for several reasons. A punishment can be an effective deterrent only if it is consistently and promptly employed.
Capital punishment cannot be administered to meet these conditions. The proportion of first-degree murderers who are sentenced to death is small, and of this group, an even smaller proportion of people are executed.
Although death sentences in the mids increased to about per year , this is still only about one percent of all homicides known to the police. Of all those convicted on a charge of criminal homicide, only 3 percent — about 1 in 33 — are eventually sentenced to death. Between , the average number of death sentences per year dropped to , reducing the percentage even more.
Mandatory death sentencing is unconstitutional. The possibility of increasing the number of convicted murderers sentenced to death and executed by enacting mandatory death penalty laws was ruled unconstitutional in Woodson v. North Carolina , U. A considerable time between the imposition of the death sentence and the actual execution is unavoidable, given the procedural safeguards required by the courts in capital cases. Starting with selecting the trial jury, murder trials take far longer when the ultimate penalty is involved.
Furthermore, post-conviction appeals in death-penalty cases are far more frequent than in other cases. These factors increase the time and cost of administering criminal justice. We can reduce delay and costs only by abandoning the procedural safeguards and constitutional rights of suspects, defendants, and convicts — with the attendant high risk of convicting the wrong person and executing the innocent.
This is not a realistic prospect: our legal system will never reverse itself to deny defendants the right to counsel, or the right to an appeal. Persons who commit murder and other crimes of personal violence often do not premeditate their crimes.
Most capital crimes are committed in the heat of the moment. Most capital crimes are committed during moments of great emotional stress or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, when logical thinking has been suspended.
Many capital crimes are committed by the badly emotionally-damaged or mentally ill. In such cases, violence is inflicted by persons unable to appreciate the consequences to themselves as well as to others. Even when crime is planned, the criminal ordinarily concentrates on escaping detection, arrest, and conviction. The threat of even the severest punishment will not discourage those who expect to escape detection and arrest.
It is impossible to imagine how the threat of any punishment could prevent a crime that is not premeditated. Furthermore, the death penalty is a futile threat for political terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh, because they usually act in the name of an ideology that honors its martyrs. Capital punishment doesn't solve our society's crime problem.
Threatening capital punishment leaves the underlying causes of crime unaddressed, and ignores the many political and diplomatic sanctions such as treaties against asylum for international terrorists that could appreciably lower the incidence of terrorism.
Capital punishment has been a useless weapon in the so-called "war on drugs. It is irrational to think that the death penalty — a remote threat at best — will avert murders committed in drug turf wars or by street-level dealers.
If, however, severe punishment can deter crime, then permanent imprisonment is severe enough to deter any rational person from committing a violent crime. The vast preponderance of the evidence shows that the death penalty is no more effective than imprisonment in deterring murder and that it may even be an incitement to criminal violence. Death-penalty states as a group do not have lower rates of criminal homicide than non-death-penalty states.
Use of the death penalty in a given state may actually increase the subsequent rate of criminal homicide. Perhaps because "a return to the exercise of the death penalty weakens socially based inhibitions against the use of lethal force to settle disputes…. In adjacent states — one with the death penalty and the other without it — the state that practices the death penalty does not always show a consistently lower rate of criminal homicide.
For example, between l and l, the homicide rates in Wisconsin and Iowa non-death-penalty states were half the rates of their neighbor, Illinois — which restored the death penalty in l, and by had sentenced persons to death and carried out two executions. On-duty police officers do not suffer a higher rate of criminal assault and homicide in abolitionist states than they do in death-penalty states. Between and , for example, lethal assaults against police were not significantly more or less frequent in abolitionist states than in death-penalty states.
Capital punishment did not appear to provide officers added protection during that time frame. In fact, the three leading states in law enforcement homicide in were also very active death penalty states : California highest death row population , Texas most executions since , and Florida third highest in executions and death row population.
If anything, the death penalty incited violence rather than curbed it. Prisoners and prison personnel do not suffer a higher rate of criminal assault and homicide from life-term prisoners in abolition states than they do in death-penalty states.
Between and , inmates were murdered by other prisoners. Evidently, the threat of the death penalty "does not even exert an incremental deterrent effect over the threat of a lesser punishment in the abolitionist states. Actual experience thus establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the death penalty does not deter murder.
No comparable body of evidence contradicts that conclusion. Furthermore, there are documented cases in which the death penalty actually incited the capital crimes it was supposed to deter.
These include instances of the so-called suicide-by-execution syndrome — persons who wanted to die but feared taking their own lives, and committed murder so that the state would kill them.
For example, in , Daniel Colwell , who suffered from mental illness, claimed that he killed a randomly-selected couple in a Georgia parking lot so that the state would kill him — he was sentenced to death and ultimately took his own life while on death row.
Although inflicting the death penalty guarantees that the condemned person will commit no further crimes, it does not have a demonstrable deterrent effect on other individuals.
Further, it is a high price to pay when studies show that few convicted murderers commit further crimes of violence. Researchers examined the prison and post-release records of prisoners on death row in whose sentences were reduced to incarceration for life by the Supreme Court's ruling in Furman.
This research showed that seven had committed another murder. But the same study showed that in four other cases, an innocent man had been sentenced to death. Recidivism among murderers does occasionally happen, but it occurs less frequently than most people believe; the media rarely distinguish between a convicted offender who murders while on parole, and a paroled murderer who murders again.
There is also a chance that a mistake will be made, and the wrong person will be put to death. Is this type of revenge worth such a risk? Another problem with capital punishment is the high cost. For example, the special prison housing is expensive to staff and keep up. States with the death penalty use taxes to pay these expenses.
That is a great deal of money. In addition, using the death penalty is a very slow process. At least 97 percent of all death-row prisoners are not executed on time. As a result, the waiting list for executions grows year after year. If the U. A process this slow does not make sense.
Many people believe that retribution is morally flawed and problematic in concept and practice. The main argument that retribution is immoral is that it is just a sanitised form of vengeance. Scenes of howling mobs attacking prison vans containing those accused of murder on their way to and from court, or chanting aggressively outside prisons when an offender is being executed, suggest that vengeance remains a major ingredient in the public popularity of capital punishment.
But just retribution, designed to re-establish justice, can easily be distinguished from vengeance and vindictiveness. The Victorian legal philosopher James Fitzjames Stephens thought vengeance was an acceptable justification for punishment. Punishment, he thought, should be inflicted:. But the issue of the execution of innocent persons is also a problem for the retribution argument - if there is a serious risk of executing the innocent then one of the key principles of retribution - that people should get what they deserve and therefore only what they deserve - is violated by the current implementation of capital punishment in the USA, and any other country where errors have taken place.
It's argued that retribution is used in a unique way in the case of the death penalty. Crimes other than murder do not receive a punishment that mimics the crime - for example rapists are not punished by sexual assault, and people guilty of assault are not ceremonially beaten up. Camus and Dostoevsky argued that the retribution in the case of the death penalty was not fair, because the anticipatory suffering of the criminal before execution would probably outweigh the anticipatory suffering of the victim of their crime.
Others argue that the retribution argument is flawed because the death penalty delivers a 'double punishment'; that of the execution and the preceding wait, and this is a mismatch to the crime. Many offenders are kept 'waiting' on death row for a very long time; in the USA the average wait is 10 years. In Japan, the accused are only informed of their execution moments before it is scheduled. The result of this is that each day of their life is lived as if it was their last.
Some lawyers argue that capital punishment is not really used as retribution for murder, or even consistently for a particular kind of murder. They argue that, in the USA at least, only a small minority of murderers are actually executed, and that imposition of capital punishment on a "capriciously selected random handful" of offenders does not amount to a consistent programme of retribution. Since capital punishment is not operated retributively, it is inappropriate to use retribution to justify capital punishment.
This argument would have no value in a society that applied the death penalty consistently for particular types of murder.
Some people who believe in the notion of retribution are against capital punishment because they feel the death penalty provides insufficient retribution. They argue that life imprisonment without possibility of parole causes much more suffering to the offender than a painless death after a short period of imprisonment.
Another example is the planner of a suicide bombing - execution might make that person a martyr, and therefore would be a lesser retribution than life imprisonment. The death penalty doesn't seem to deter people from committing serious violent crimes. The thing that deters is the likelihood of being caught and punished. The general consensus among social scientists is that the deterrent effect of the death penalty is at best unproven.
In a survey was conducted for the UN to determine the relation between the death penalty and homicide rates. This was then updated in It concluded:. Such proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. The evidence as a whole still gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis.
The key to real and true deterrence is to increase the likelihood of detection, arrest and conviction. NB: It's actually impossible to test the deterrent effect of a punishment in a rigorous way, as to do so would require knowing how many murders would have been committed in a particular state if the law had been different during the same time period.
Even if capital punishment did act as a deterrent, is it acceptable for someone to pay for the predicted future crimes of others? This isn't true - if people are randomly picked up off the street and punished as scapegoats the only consequence is likely to be that the public will be frightened to go out. To make a scapegoat scheme effective it would be necessary to go through the appearance of a legitimate legal process and to present evidence which convinced the public that the person being punished deserved their punishment.
While some societies have operated their legal systems on the basis of fictional evidence and confessions extracted by torture, the ethical objections to such a system are sufficient to render the argument in the second paragraph pointless.
Statistics show that the death penalty leads to a brutalisation of society and an increase in murder rate. In the USA, more murders take place in states where capital punishment is allowed.
In , the murder rate in states where the death penalty has been abolished was 4. In states where the death penalty is used, the figure was 5.
The death penalty disproportionately affects certain groups The death penalty is not a good example of blind justice. Studies show that the mentally ill, people of color, and the poor make up the majority of death row inmates.
When researchers take a deeper dive, they discover patterns of discrimination based on race. According to the United Nations , the poor are also disproportionately affected by the death penalty on a global scale.
They are less likely to get good representation and the system is biased against them. Even though these groups are not committing the most crimes, they are the ones receiving the most severe punishment.
In theory, the death penalty is only intended for use as punishment for the most serious crimes, like murder. However, in places around the world, governments use executions for non-lethal crimes.
This includes drug-related offenses, burglary, adultery, blasphemy, and political crimes.
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