Death Penalty
Toward Understanding the Death Penalty Debate
The death penalty remains a source of contentious public debate in the United States. No other democracy in the world uses it, yet public opinion polls in the United States have shown that support for the death penalty has been as high as eighty percent and rarely as low as fifty percent, although for a brief moment in the 1960s it fell below the fiftieth percentile. Currently, public opinion polls show that sixty-seven percent of the American people support the death penalty, although that figure drops to fifty-three percent when the option of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is presented as an alternative.1
In Furman v. Georgia (1972), the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional because it was implemented in a manner that was arbitrary and capricious. This ruling sent states back to their legislative drawing boards to fashion death penalty legislation that would avoid claims that the......
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