DEATH PENALTY AND THE UNITED STATES
The death penalty has been challenged many times in the past thirty-five years. I believe that most of the problems started in 1976 during the Gregg V. Georgia Supreme Courtcase. Mr. Gregg was found guilty of armed robbery and murder and sentenced was to death. On appeal, the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence except as to its imposition for the robbery conviction. Gregg challenged his remaining death sentence for murder, claiming that his capital sentence was a "cruel and unusual" punishment that violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. And since that court case, there have been fore more trying to say that the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.
In the last one hundred years of United States History, the government has never worked on an “Eye-for-an-Eye” punishment. An “Eye-for-an-Eye” punishment example is that if you steal, your hands get cut off. Another is that if you kill, you will be killed. In other words, the death penalty. That is the one and only example of an “Eye-for-an-Eye” punishment in the United States. The United Statesputs people on death row for murder and only some states put you on death row for something other than murder. However, each state has different severity levels of the crime thatmust have passed to be placed on death row.
Thirty-eight of the fifty states use the death penalty. The twelve states that do not use the death penalty are Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and The District of Columbia (Washington DC.) It seems to me that the main region that doesn’t support the death penalty is the North East, Northern Midwest, and some North Western states. That means that most of the states that support the death penalty are in the South East, Southern Midwest, Midwest, South West, and the West Coast.
All the other Thirty-eight...