Fighting Against The Death Penalty

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Fighting Against the Death Penalty

A Supreme Court decision in 1972 declared that the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S Constitution. (Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S.238) The majority of the Court based its objections on the way death-penalty laws had been applied, finding the result so "harsh, freakish, and arbitrary" as to be constitutionally unacceptable. Making the nationwide impact of its decision unmistakable, the Court instantly reversed death sentences in the many previous cases. Within four years after the Furman decision, more than 600 people had been sentenced to death under new capital-punishment statutes that provided guidance for the jury's sentencing discretion. In July 1976, the Supreme Court moved in the opposite direction, holding that the punishment of death does not invariably violate the Constitution. The Court ruled that these new statutes contained objective standards to guide, regularize, and make rationally review able the process for imposing the sentence of death. (Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S.153). Despite the Supreme Court's 1976 ruling in Gregg v. Georgia, the ACLU continues to oppose capital punishment on moral and practical, as well as on constitutional, grounds:

• Capital punishment is cruel and unusual. It is a relic of the earliest days of penology, when slavery, branding, and other corporal punishments were commonplace. Like those other barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society (U.S Dept. of Justice).

• Capital punishment denies due process of law. Its imposition is arbitrary and irrevocable. It forever deprives an individual of benefits for new evidence or new law that might warrant the reversal of a conviction or the setting aside of a death sentence (U.S Dept. of Justice).
The argument most often cited in support of capital punishment is that th...