Homework answers / question archive / Create a 9 pages page paper that discusses capital punishment in the united states: legitimacy and efficacy in a modern liberal society

Create a 9 pages page paper that discusses capital punishment in the united states: legitimacy and efficacy in a modern liberal society

Writing

Share With

Create a 9 pages page paper that discusses capital punishment in the united states: legitimacy and efficacy in a modern liberal society. Furthermore, the author contends that such an application can be morally justified in terms of the values and goals of a society that, at its core, has a fundamental respect for the integrity of the individual and human life itself.

Between 1930 (the first year reliable nation-wide statistics began to be collected on a regular basis) and 1967 (when an unofficial moratorium on executions began), 3,859 persons were put to death by civil jurisdictions.1 At present, courts of the Federal government, the United States military, and 37 states are legislatively authorized to impose the death penalty. Almost all such penalties have resulted from state-level proceedings. Since the resumption of executions in 1977—after a four-year moratorium2 imposed pursuant to the Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia (408 U.S. 238, 1972) and brought to an end with the Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia (428 U.S. 153, 1976)—over 1100 persons have been put to death, all but one by lethal injection. Of these, all but three3 were put to death by state authorities.

Despite a large number of homicides committed in the United States each year, only a small fraction of those convicted are sentenced to death. Actual executions, while prominently reported, are few in absolute numbers, at least in comparison to the number of persons sentenced to death. According to the latest published statistics of the Department of Justice/Bureau of Justice Statistics (2008), at year-end 2006 there were 3,226 persons on death row in correction facilities across the United States. Of these 1,802 were white, 1,352 were black, and 74 were of other ethnicities. All but 54 were male. (A second moratorium on executions took effect in late 2006. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Baze v. Rees (SC, 07-5493), in which case the petitioner challenges lethal objection as implicating the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment (prohibiting ‘cruel and unusual’ punishments). The Court heard oral arguments in early January 2008 and will hand down an opinion later this year.