Capital Punishment

7 Pages 1759 Words

urman Vs. Georgia decision “invalidated all existing death sentence statutes as violative of the 8th amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment and thus depopulated state death rows of 629 occupants” (Berger 353). This decision was reached not because, as Justice Stewart put it, the “death penalty as actually applied was unconstitutionally arbitrary” (Berger 353). The question of whether executions are a “cruel” form of punishment may no longer be an argument against capital punishment now that it can be done with lethal injections, but it is still very “unusual” in that it only applies to a select number of individuals making it completely discriminatory and arbitrary.

For the past decades, capital punishment has been one of the most hotly debated topics in America. The debate is complex and complicated because it involves legal, logic, philosophical, social, political, and moral questions. There are four key issues at the root of the capital punishment debate, all of them stirring up America’s feelings towards this issue. They are 1. Deterrence 2. Retribution 3. Arbitrariness 4. The danger of mistake.

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