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
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“Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“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)
“No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My object all sublime I shall achieve in time—
To let the punishment fit the crime— The punishment fit the crime; And make each prisoner pent Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment! Of innocent merriment!”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“In the United States adherence to the values of the masculine mystique makes intimate, self-revealing, deep friendships between men unusual.”
—Myriam Miedzian, U.S. author. Boys Will Be Boys, introduction (1991)
“The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomac ... and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)