Capital Punishment

9 Pages 2261 Words

enth century, opposition to the death penalty gathered enough strength to lead to important restrictions on the use of the death penalty in several northern states, while in the United States, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island abandoned the practice altogether. In 1794, Pennsylvania adopted a law to distinguish the degrees of murder and only use the death penalty for premeditated first-degree murder. Another reform took place in 1846 in Louisiana. This state abolished the mandatory death penalty and authorized the option of sentencing a capital offender to life imprisonment rather than to death. After the 1830s, public executions ceased to be demonstrated but did not completely stop until after 1936. Throughout history, governments have been extremely inventive in devising ways to execute people. Executions inflicted in the past are now regarded today as ghastly, barbaric, and unthinkable and are forbidden by law almost everywhere. Common historical methods of execution included: stoning, crucifixion, burning, breaking on the wheel, drawing and quartering, beheading and decapitation, shooting, and hanging. These types of punishments today are banned by the eighth amendment to the constitution (The Constitution, Amendment 8). In the United States, the death penalty is currently implemented in one of five ways: firing squad, hanging, gas chamber, electrocution, and lethal injection. These methods of execution compared to those of the past are not meant for torture, but meant for punishment for the crime. For the past decades, capital punishment has been one of the most hotly contested political issues in America. This debate is a complicated one. Capital punishment is a legal, practical, philosophical, social, political, and moral question. The notion of deterrence has been at the very center of the practical debate over the question of capital punishment. Most of us assume that we execute murderers primarily because we believe it wil...