St. Joseph

St. Joseph

  • Submitted By: sscrocks
  • Date Submitted: 04/11/2010 9:17 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 562
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 245

Drew Goscinski
Mrs. Hamm
English IV
5 February 2010

Research Paper Rough Draft
The death penalty can be a useful tool of punishment for criminals who were sentenced to hard time for a serious offense. Prisoners who have committed some of the most serious offenses and sent to prison are given the death penalty. The death penalty is reserved for only the most serious offenses, which most commonly consist of murders. The actual death penalty can consist of a lethal injection, or, as used in the past, the electric chair.

Some of the first death penalties took place in Britain in the early tenth century. In those days the most common type of death penalty was hanging. Hanging consisted of tying a rope into a knot around a person’s neck and dropping at a certain height until the neck snapped or until the person choked to death from lack of oxygen to the lungs. As the decades went on, more advanced types of death sentences began to appear on the scene. Some of these more advanced types of death sentences began to come about in the eighteenth century. Most executions were because of common cases like murder, but also consisted of cases like treason. In France in the eighteenth century the most common public executions were beheadings. These executions took place using the guillotine in open squares where all of the people were able to witness the executions occur.
In the early twentieth century even more advanced forms of the death sentence began to appear. One of those new forms of the sentence was the electric chair. The chair began to show up in a number of prisons all over the country in the twenties and the thirties. The chair proved to be a durable tool in execution. Electricity would be shot through wires strapped to the felon and sent throughout his body, essentially killing him instantly in the process. The chair was such a success that more and more prisons around the nation began to demand the chair for their version of the death sentence. As...

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