Can you imagine the United States without capital punishment? There would be rapist and murders out in the streets just looking for there prey. The most common offenses for which the death penalty has been imposed are treason, murder, and rape. Other death eligible offenses are train-wrecking, perjury causing execution, drug trafficking, air-craft piracy, and contact murder. Most states in the United States have the death penalty except Alaska, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
The United States used to set executions out in the public as a warning for other offenders. But people protested that the executions were to cruel and bloody, so in order to make the executions more humane legislators passed for lethal injection to be used. Methods of execution have varied over the years, but the United States has used lynching, the firing squad, the gas chamber, the electric chair and now lethal injection. The first prisoner ever to die by lethal injection was Charles Brooks on December 6, 1982 in Texas.
The physical pain of the execution is probably the smallest concern of the offenders during their wait on death row. A wait that often takes eight to ten years. The longest time for being sentenced to death and execution appears to be twenty-five years. Most executions have taken place in the south but mostly in Texas.
A lot of people say that murders who receive the death penalty get of much easier than their victims. Like in the case of John Wayne Gacy. On May 10,1994, serial killer John Wayne Gacy was out to death by lethal injection at Statesville Correctional Center, a maximum-security facility in Joliet, Illinois. Gacy, once known as a remodeling contractor, he had been convicted a decade and a half earlier of the sex-linked murders of 33 young men and boys. His execution was originally set for June 1980, but dozens of appeals kept him alive...