America’s Deadliest Penalty: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States.

Abstract

In the United States of America, the controversy surrounding capital punishment spans across every state as well as more than 100 years of debate. Also referred to as the death penalty2, capital punishment includes “the practice of killing people as punishment for serious crimes,” 3 according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. While many other Western societies have abolished capital punishment from their legal systems4 either formally or in practice, the United States has yet to abandon this institution. However, the United States Supreme Court steadily limits the death penalty.

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This paper includes a survey of twenty-five cases pertaining to capital punishment5. I begin by exploring the history of the death penalty. In Section II, I introduce the legal texts central to the death penalty debate, the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, to make cases in this paper easier to understand within a broader constitutional context. (from Introduction)