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Capital punishment is the lawful infliction of the death penalty, and since ancient times it has been used to punish a wide variety of offences. The Bible prescribes death for murder and many other crimes, including kidnapping and witchcraft. By 1500 in England, only major felonies carried the death penalty: treason, murder, larceny, burglary, rape, and arson. By 1800, however, Parliament had enacted many new capital offences, and hundreds of persons were being sentenced to death each year. In the United States prior to the Civil War, the death penalty was imposed an slaves far many crimes punished less severely when committed by others.
Reform of the death penalty began in Europe by the 1750s, and was championed by such thinkers as the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria, the French philosopher Voltaire, and the English law reformer Jeremy Bentham. They argued that the death penalty was needlessly cruel, overrated as a deterrent, and occasionally imposed in fatal error. Along with Quaker leaders and other social reformers, they defended life imprisonment as a mare rational alternative.
By the 1850s these reform efforts bare fruit. In the United States the death penalty far murder was first abolished in Michigan (1847); Venezuela (1853) and Portugal (1867) were the first nations to abolish it altogether. Today, it is virtually abolished in all of Western Europe and most of Latin America. Elsewhere-in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (except Israel)-most countries still authorise capital punishment far many crimes and it with varying frequency.
Methods of inflicting the death penalty have ranged from stoning in biblical times, crucifixion under the Romans, beheading in France, to those used in the United States today: HANGING, ELECTROCUTION, GAS CHAMBER, firing squad, and LETHAL INJECTION.
In the United States, beginning in 1967, executions were suspended to allow the appellate courts to decide whether the death penalty was unconstitunal. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in Furman V. Georgia that the death penalty for murder or for rape violated the prohibition against ,,cruel and unusual punishment.\" The Court argued that death was meted out with ,,freakish\" irregularity and so its use was ,,arbitrary\" and ,,cruel.\" Most of the states enacted new death penalty statutes, however, and in 1976 the Supreme Court in Gregg v. Georgia held that these were not unconstitutional. Capital status now typically authorise the trial court to impose sentence (death or life) only after a post conviction hearing, at which evidence is submitted to establish which aggravating\" or ,,mitigating\" factors were present in the crime. If the ,,aggravating\" factors prevail and the sentence is death, then the case is automatically reviewed by an appellate court. In 1977, however, the Supreme Court also ruled that death far rape was ,,grossly disproportionate and excessive\" (Coker v. Georgia). Thus, apart from certain crimes (notably, treason) an which the Supreme Court has not ruled, the only capital crime in the United States today is murder.
In 1977, executions resumed, and by 1985 more than 1,500 persons were under death sentence in 33 states. The rate of executions also increased, averaging nearly two per month during 1984 and 1985. Public opinion seemed to support this; various polls reported that about 70% of Americans favoured the death penalty for murder.
Debate over the merits of capital punishment continues unabated. Proponents defend it mainly an two grounds: death is the fitting punishment far murder, and executions maximise public safety thorough incapacitation and deterrence. Opponents reply that there is no evidence that the murder rate fluctuates according to the frequency with which the death penalty is used. They also abject that lex talionis (,,a life far a life\") is not a sound principle of criminal justice- that society cannot allow the brutalities of criminal violence to set the limits of appropriate punishments. Also disputed is whether the death penalty continues (as critics claim) to manifest racial and socio-economic bias.
On October 16, 1985, the electrocution of William Vandiver by the state of Indiana took seventeen minutes, requiring five charges of electricity On April 22, 1983, as the state of Alabama electrocuted John Louis Evans the first electrial charge burned through the electrode an the leg and the electrode fell off. The prison guards repaired it and administered another charge of electricity. Smoke and flame erupted from Evan\'s temple and leg but the man was still alive. Following the second jolt, Evan\'s lawyer demanded that Governor George C. Wallace halt the proceedings. The governor refused. Another jolt was administered. It took fourteen minutes far Evans to die. On May 5, 1990, as the state of Florida killed Jesse Tafero, flames shat six inches from the head his head. The executioner interrupted the standard twa-minute2,0OO-valt electrical cycle and officials determined that a sponge an Tafero\'s head had caught fire.
The only man to walk away from an electric chair alive was seventeen-year- old Willie Francis. On May 2,1946, he was strapped into Louisiana's portable electric chair in the jail in St. Marin Parish. As the current hit his body, witness reported that the youth\'s ,,lips puffed out and he groaned and jumped so that the chair came off the floor, and he said, ,,take it off. Let me breathe.\" The officials applied several mare jolts, but Francis was still alive. They then helped him back to his cell to recuperate from the ordeal. The U.S. Supreme Court, considering whether it could be considered ,,cruel and unusual punishment\" or \"double jeopardy\" to subject Francis to electrocution a second time, rendered a split verdict. On May 8, 1947, Louisiana officials once again strapped Willie Francis into the chair, but this time they succeeded in killing him.
But evidence that executions do not deter crime is conclusive. In the U.S. the murder rate is no higher in states that do not have the death penalty than in those that do. In Canada, the homicide rate peaked in 1975, the year before the death penalty was abolished, and continued to decline far ten years afterward. and the first major report an capital punishment prepared for the United Nations in 1962 concluded:
,,all the information available appears to confirm that such a removal (of the death penalty) has, in fact, never been followed by a notable rise in the incidence of the crime no longer punishable by death.\" In the fall of 1987, immediately after the state of Louisiana executed eight people in eight and a half weeks, the murder rate in New Orleans rose 16.39 percent.
In contrast, New York City, in a state with no death penalty, reduced its crime rate dramatically in the first four months of 1992- murders declined by 11 percent- which many attribute to increased community policing. In 1990 the city had 750 foot officers an the streets. Today there are 3,000.
Similarly, in New Orleans in 1992, the year ended with a 21 percent decrease in the murder rate, halting a three-year stretch of record-breaking murder rates, a decline which police readily attribute to two federal drug-fighting programs and beefed-up police patrols in high-crime areas.
Between 1960 and 1976,the number of reported murders in the United States more than doubled- from 9,060 to 18,780- and between 1960 and 1980 the rate of ,,index crimes\" listed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation rose by mare than 230 percent.
Despite high pro-death-penalty sentiment, however, public support seems stronger in the abstract than in the concrete. Most juries, for example, faced with actually imposing death in capital trials, choose life imprisonment, even in ,,Death Belt\" states, and a growing number of public opinion surveys show that it is protection from criminals rather than executions that most citizens want. A 1986 Gallup Pall reveals that while 70 % say they favour the death penalty if they are given new data that shows that capital punishment does not deter crime and are offered the alternative of life imprisonment without parole, support for execution drops to 43 percent.
An execution of a prisoner costs mare than life imprisonment. That\'s because capital trials require more expert witness and mare investigators, a longer jury-selection process (those who oppose the death penalty must be screened out), the expenses of sequestering a jury, not one but two trials because of the required separate sentencing trial, and appeals in state and federal courts.
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