Mr. Duncan's History Page
History Lab: Should the Death Penalty be allowed in the United States of America? Death Penalty Background:The death penalty in the United States began its life as an import. Brought over from the United Kingdom, it evolved into different versions that depended largely on each state that adopted it.Virginia was the?first colonial government known to kill a man, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The government executed George Kendall in 1608 after charging him with spying for Spain.Four years later, activities such as exchanging goods with Native Americans or killing chickens were crimes punishable by death in Virginia. From 1665 in the colony of New York, residents could be killed for denying the "true God."But a contingent of colonial anti-death penalty activists had its first major legislative victory soon after America was founded. In 1794, Pennsylvania outlawed capital punishment for cases other than first-degree murder.From there, the legality of the death penalty played out like a tug-of-war between opposers and supporters. Some states abolished it entirely; others invented new ways to kill inmates.Michigan got rid of capital punishment for all cases except treason in 1846, while other states widened the list of crimes punishable by death. Rhode Island was the first to?ban capital punishment?for all crimes in 1852.New York constructed the country's first electric chair in 1888, and other states followed. Six states abolished capital punishment between 1907-1917.But in 1924, in search of a more humane way to kill its death row inmates, Nevada tried to?pump cyanide gas into the cell?of inmate Gee Jon. That failed, so Nevada built a gas chamber.The 1930s saw more executions in America than any other decade. Yet by the 1950s, as nations across the globe curbed or eliminated their use of the death penalty, American support for capital punishment also plunged. The number of executions followed suit.By 1966, just 42% of the country supported it, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Then, in 1972, the Supreme Court made a historic decision. By a vote of 5-4, the court ruled that Georgia's death penalty statute could be interpreted as "cruel and unusual" punishment.The ruling affected death penalty laws in all states that still had them, effectively suspending the punishment nationwide.But the Supreme Court hadn't ruled that the death penalty itself was illegal. The justices just didn't like the arbitrariness of Georgia law. It allowed states to rewrite their own legislation so that the language specified when the death penalty was and was not a viable punishment.Florida proposed a new law in?less than half a year, and 34 more states followed. By 1976, the Supreme Court had reinstated the penalty.The next year,?Utah famously executed Gary Gilmore — at his request —?by firing squad. It was the first U.S. execution in 10 years.From that point, support for the death penalty began to soar. By 1996,?78% of Americans supported capital punishment, according to Pew Research Center.That number had slid back down to 55% by 2014, and capital punishment is?currently legal in 32 states. Maryland was the most recent state to outlaw the death penalty, doing so in 2013.Texas, by contrast, has?executed 521 people since 1976, by far the most in the country.Of the 32 states in which capital punishment is legal, the?vast majority use lethal injection, which is a combination of deadly drugs that stops the inmate's heart.But some states have alternative methods. Death row inmates in Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia can request electrocution instead of lethal injection, and electrocution is the back-up plan in Oklahoma in case lethal injection becomes illegal.In New Hampshire and Washington, prisoners can still be hanged.Source: Source 1: Video:?“Death Penalty in America,”?CNN – Short video to provide a little background on the issue. May / 2014Source 2: Amendment 7 from the Bill of Rights, 1789Amendment VIIIExcessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.Source 3: Death Penalty Map from July 2015Source 4: Victim of a crime / 5: A “death chamber” is shown in Huntsville, TX. / Credit: Joe Raedle/Newsmakers via Getty Images / 2014Source 5: “With death penalty, let punishment truly fit the crime” / CNN, August 22, 2013 / written by Robert BleckerNo matter how vicious the crime, no matter how vile the criminal, some death penalty opponents feel certain that nobody can ever deserve to die -- even if that person burned children alive, massacred a dozen strangers in a movie theater, or bombed the Boston Marathon. Other opponents admit the worst of the worst of the worst do deserve to die. They just distrust the government ever to get it right.Now that pharmaceutical companies refuse to supply the lethal drugs that U.S. corrections departments have used for years to execute criminals -- whether from their own genuine moral objections or to escape a threatened economic boycott -- states have begun to experiment. Death penalty opponents, who call themselves abolitionists, then protest the use of these untried drugs that just might cause a condemned killer to feel pain as he dies.Let the punishment fit the crime. We've mouthed that credo for centuries, but do we really mean it? We retributivists who believe in justice would reward those who bring us pleasure, but punish severely those who sadistically or wantonly cause us pain. A basic retributive measure -- like for like or giving a person a taste of his own medicine -- satisfies our deepest instincts for justice.When the condemned killer intentionally tortured helpless victims, how better to preserve some direct connection short of torture than by that murderer's quick but painful death? By ensuring death through anesthesia, however, we have nearly severed pain from punishment.An unpleasant life in prison, a quick but painful death cannot erase the harm. But it can help restore a moral balance.I, too, oppose lethal injection, but not because these untried new drugs might arbitrarily cause pain, but because they certainly cause confusion.Lethal injection conflates punishment with medicine. The condemned dies in a gurney, wrapped in white sheets with an IV in his veins, surrounded by his closest kin, monitored by sophisticated medical devices. Haphazardly conceived and hastily designed, lethal injection appears, feels, and seems medical, although its sole purpose is to kill.Witnessing an execution in Florida, I shuddered. It felt too much like a hospital or hospice. We almost never look to medicine to tell us whom to execute. Medicine should no more tell us how. How we kill those we rightly detest should in no way resemble how we end the suffering of those we love.Publicly opposing this method of execution, I have found odd common ground with Deborah Denno, a leading abolitionist scholar who relentlessly attacks lethal injection protocols. Although Denno vigorously opposes all capital punishment, we both agree that the firing squad, among all traditional methods, probably serves us best. It does not sugarcoat, it does not pretend, it does not shamefully obscure what we do. We kill them, intentionally, because they deserve it.Some people may support the firing squad because it allows us to put blanks in one of the guns: An individual sharpshooter will never know whether he actually killed the condemned. This strikes me as just another symptom of our avoidance of responsibility for punishment. The fact is, in this society, nobody takes responsibility for punishing criminals. Corrections officers point to judges, while judges point to legislators, and legislators to corrections. Anger and responsibility seem to lie everywhere elsewhere -- that is, nowhere. And where we cannot fully escape responsibility -- as with a firing squad -- we diffuse it.My thousands of hours observing daily life inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in several states these past 25 years have shown me the perverse irony that flows from this: Inside prisons, often the worst criminals live the most comfortable lives with the best hustles, job opportunities and sources of contraband, while the relatively petty criminals live miserably, constantly preyed upon.Refusing to even contemplate distinguishing those few most sadistic murderers who deserve to die painfully, states seem quite willing haphazardly and arbitrarily to expose prisoners in general, regardless of their crimes, to a more or less painful life, or even death at the hands of other criminals.Ironically, even as we recoil from punishing those who most deserve it, we readily over-punish those who don't. A "war on drugs" swells our prisons. We punish addiction and call it crime; we indiscriminately and immorally subject a burglar or car thief to the same daily life in prison we also reserve for rapist murderers.The time has come to make punishment more nearly fit the crime. To face what we do, and acknowledge, with regret but without shame, that the past counts.So part of me hopes the abolitionists succeed with their latest campaign against death by lethal injection. We should banish this method. Let the abolitionists threaten to boycott gun manufacturers. See where that gets them. Meanwhile, the rest of us will strive to keep our covenants with victims, restore a moral balance, and shoot to kill those who deserve to die.Rest assured, when we can only achieve justice by killing a vicious killer, We, the People will find a constitutional way to do it.Source 6: “Time to question sanity of death penalty” / CNN, July 26, 2015 / written by Philip HollowayThe verdict is in, and James Holmes?has been found guilty of first-degree murder?for killing 12 people in a movie theater in July 2012. The Colorado jury?predictably rejected his insanity defense, but that is not the end of the story. That same jury will now begin determining whether he should be executed or serve the rest of his life in prison. And, as a result, America once again finds itself in a virtually unique discussion among rich nations on whether capital punishment should apply to one of its citizens.As a former law enforcement officer, former prosecutor, criminal lawyer, and continuing real-world "student" of criminology, I've seen up close the evidence suggesting that the United States should not be having this conversation anymore, because it may be time to put an end to capital punishment completely.This is not because I have any moral objection to executing the worst of the worst -- those who murder innocent victims, sometimes in the most horrific ways imaginable. It is hard to see capital punishment as particularly "cruel" or "unusual" when the victims will often have died much worse deaths than the killer will be subjected to. But the fact is that there are several practical reasons why the death penalty just doesn't make sense any longer, if it ever really did in the first place.1.?Executions are actually less punitive than life without parole. I've never been to prison, but having dealt regularly with prisoners, it's clear that prison life is hard -- very hard. And you don't have to take my word for it. Recently executed murderer David Zink?had this to say?about it just before his death by lethal injection in Missouri:"For those who remain on death row, understand that everyone is going to die. ... Statistically speaking, we have a much easier death than most, so I encourage you to embrace it and celebrate our true liberation before society figures it out and condemns us to life without parole and we too will die a lingering death."This point of view is not surprising when you look at the Supermax prison in Colorado, whichsome have described as a fate worse than death. There, inmates typically spend 23 hours a day locked inside a cell, with little communication with other inmates or the outside world. There are also state versions of these facilities, which the New York City Bar Association?has labeled as cruel and unusual punishment, likening imprisonment in one as torture under international law.2.?Death penalty litigation makes no financial sense. Numerous studies have found that death penalty criminal litigation costs taxpayers far more than prosecutions seeking life without parole. For example, in Colorado, where the Holmes jury now has to spend the next several weeks hearing evidence, the state will shell out approximately $3.5 million, as opposed to an average of $150,000 if the state had not sought the death penalty,?according to the American Civil Liberties Union.Why? Because the average length of the initial prosecution for a death penalty case -- not including lengthy appeals -- means more than a thousand extra days of courtroom resources are being used. Judges, prosecutors, public defenders, court reporters, jurors, bailiffs and other courtroom staff are all needed just to conduct a trial, and that means spending a lot of money from state coffers that could have been used elsewhere. In Colorado's case specifically, the state has executed exactly one person since 1976, when the Supreme Court of the United States lifted the moratorium on capital punishment in the landmark ruling of Gregg v. Georgia. So is this punishment phase of the Holmes trial really necessary? Only time will tell, but the fact remains that Colorado has historically been hesitant, to say the least, to execute murderers.3.?Death penalty litigation is harder on families of murder victims. Death penalty cases on average take 25 years or so to reach ultimate resolution, whether it be the imposition of the death sentence, a reversal or otherwise. As such, family members and loved ones of murder victims often find themselves entangled in the justice system for a very long time. In fact, in Colorado, the trial portion of the process alone is?six times longer?than if the state were seeking life without parole.4.?The death penalty is not evenly applied. For starters,?only 31 of the 50 U.S. states employ capital punishment. And even in states where it is an option, prosecutors can decide against pursuing a death sentence. This is the case in the "hot car death" in Cobb County, Georgia, involving Justin Ross Harris, who is accused of murdering his young son by leaving him strapped in a car seat to bake to death.?With the death penalty off the table, any conviction and appeals process would be much shorter than in a capital case.Wise use of prosecutorial discretion should therefore be welcomed, not least because prosecutors know their cases better than anyone. Also, prosecutorial discretion can mean that a case costs much less, eliminates many appellate issues, shortens the trial and ultimately brings the matter to a conclusion much sooner than if it were a death penalty trial.5.?Despite safeguards, innocent people do wind up on death row. The fact is that innocent people are convicted and sometimes end up on death row. I have plenty of heartbreaking stories of clients who, in my opinion, were convicted of crimes they did not commit. And I am far from alone -- there have been 154 verified cases of death row exonerations since 1973.Meanwhile, a?study last year?found that, at a conservative estimate, "more than 4 percent of inmates sentenced to death in the United States are probably innocent." Indeed, there have been 330 exonerations based on DNA alone, with 20 of those defendants having served time on death row since the advent of DNA technology. A case from North Carolina underscores this point. There, Henry McCollum was?released last year?after spending some 30 years on death row for the murder of an 11-year-old girl that DNA evidence suggested he did not commit. With cases such as this, it defies all reason to believe that no innocent person has been executed in the United States.The bottom line is this: While the death penalty is neither "cruel," when taking into account the cruelty so often inflicted on the victim, nor "unusual," in that it has been around for millennia, there are simply too many practical reasons for states to curtail or abandon their use of the death penalty. Our criminal justice system -- and those caught up in it, including the families of victims -- would be the biggest beneficiaries should we choose to end capital punishment in the United States.Of course, the debate over capital punishment is a longstanding one, and there is no end to it in sight. But it is hard not to question the rationality -- indeed the sanity -- of continuing to follow a system that does not deter violent crime for determined individuals.One example of such a determined individual is admitted cop killer, Jamie Hood, who wasrecently convicted?of the murder of Athens, Georgia Police officer Buddy Christian. Bizarrely, Hood represented himself and beat almost half of the 70 count indictment and also "won" the sentencing phase of the trial when a jury, after deliberating only about an hour and a half, returned a verdict of life without parole -- a sentence which Hood offered to accept on a guilty plea. This further illustrates that capital punishment does not deter individuals who are intent on murder.Just ask Chattanooga or Charleston.Source or Text ? Is this image, document or video for, against, or neutral towards the death penalty?What are the strengths of this source, video or image? What are the weaknesses of this source or image? Source 1: Death Penalty Video Source 2: ?7th Amendment Source 3: ?Death Penalty Map Source 4: ?Victim of a crime imageSource 5 Death Chamber ImageSource 6Punishment should fit the crime article Source 7Time to question death penalty article ................
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