The Death Penalty

Essay by jtallen7High School, 12th gradeA+, May 2004

download word file, 7 pages 3.7

Throughout America's history, the death penalty has been applied disproportionately to the poor and blacks. The death penalty, also known as capital punishment, is the execution of criminals by the state for committing heinous crimes such as rape and murder. The death penalty, which is legal execution, has existed as long as has human culture. Capital Punishment, the death penalty, is punishment by death. The variations of death are the gas chamber, electrocution, lethal injection, hanging, or firing squad in the United States. In most cultures, this sentence is reserved for the most severe crimes, murder, violent sexual assault, and treason.

In America's history black and poor defendants have always been sentenced to death and executed unfairly and disproportionately in terms of population. For example, of the "455 criminals executed for rape after 1930 in the southern states, 405 were black" (Monagle 15). The U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 recognized this discrimination when it ruled in Furman v.

Georgia that courts were applying the death penalty optionally, in violation of the Eight and Fourteenth Amendments by sentencing blacks to death. Justice William O. Douglass stated: "The discretion of judges and juries in imposing the death penalty enables the penalty to be selectively applied, feeding prejudices against the accused if he is poor and despised and lacks political clout or if he is a member of a suspect or unpopular minority." (Latzer 235). This ruling, in essence, stopped all executions for several years. States, fearing that the Supreme Court would overturn death sentences on the basis of discrimination, temporarily discontinued executions and scurried to revise and reintroduce their death penalty statutes. "By 1975, thirty-three states had revised their statutes, enabling them once again to execute criminals." (Laurence xvii).

At first, most legal experts applauded these changes and believed that they...