Capital Punishment In The United States
pital punishment in the United States is limited under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution to cases of homicide, crimes against the state, and crimes against humanity committed by mentally-competent adults. In practice, it is only ever used in cases where aggravating circumstances exist, including aggravated murder, felony murder, and contract killing.
Capital punishment was a penalty at common law, for many felonies, and was enforced in all the American colonies prior to the Declaration of Independence. The death penalty is currently a legal sentence in 37 states and in the federal civilian and military legal systems. The methods of execution and the crimes subject to the penalty vary by jurisdiction and have varied widely throughout time, though the most common method in recent decades has been lethal injection. There were 37 executions in the United States in 2008, the lowest number since 1994 (largely due to lethal injection litigation). In 2011, 13 states executed 43 inmates; in 2010, 46 people were executed.
Capital punishment is a contentious social issue in the U.S. While historically a large majority of the American public has favored it in cases of murder, the extent of this support has varied over time. There has long been strong opposition to capital punishment in the United States from certain sectors of the population, and as of 2012, seventeen states (as well as Washington, D.C.) have banned its use. While the level of public support today is lower than it was in the 1980s and 1990s (reaching an all-time high of 80 percent in 1994), it has been largely static over the past decade. A 2011 Gallup poll showed 61 percent of Americans favored it in cases of murder while 35 percent opposed it, the lowest level of support recorded by Gallup since 1972. When life in prison without parole is listed as a poll option, the public is more evenly divided; a 2010 Gallup poll found 49 percent preferring the death penalty and 46 percent favoring life without parole.
Read more about Capital Punishment In The United States: History
Famous quotes containing the words united states, capital punishment, capital, punishment, united and/or states:
“You may consider me presumptuous, gentlemen, but I claim to be a citizen of the United States, with all the qualifications of a voter. I can read the Constitution, I am possessed of two hundred and fifty dollars, and the last time I looked in the old family Bible I found I was over twenty-one years of age.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1816–1902)
“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“What children learn from punishment is that might makes right. When they are old and strong enough, they will try to get their own back; thus many children punish their parents by acting in ways distressing to them.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there,—certainly if he were already a rebel at home.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The traveler to the United States will do well ... to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)