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Anti-death penalty groups specifically argue that the death penalty is unfairly applied to African Americans. African Americans have constituted 34.5 percent of those persons executed since the death penalty's reinstatement in 1976 and 41 percent of death row inmates as of April 2018, [ 84 ] despite representing only 13 percent of the general ...
The U.S. Supreme Court has issued numerous rulings on the use of capital punishment (the death penalty). While some rulings applied very narrowly, perhaps to only one individual, other cases have had great influence over wide areas of procedure, eligible crimes, acceptable evidence and method of execution.
Three states abolished the death penalty for murder during the 19th century: Michigan (which has never executed a prisoner and is the first government in the English-speaking world to abolish capital punishment) [38] in 1847, Wisconsin in 1853, and Maine in 1887.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 1976 that allowed the death penalty's return, its justices have wrestled with arguments over who could be executed and how the life-and death-decisions ...
The federal government’s power to abolish the death penalty everywhere rests, as Hofstra Law Professor Eric Freedman recently suggested in a remarkable essay, on Congress’s authority under ...
The death penalty is sought in only a fraction of murder cases, and it is often doled out capriciously. The National Academy of Sciences concludes that its role as a deterrent is ambiguous.
The Court also found that the death penalty "comports with the basic concept of human dignity at the core of the [Eighth] Amendment". The death penalty serves two principal social purposes—retribution and deterrence. "In part, capital punishment is an expression of society's moral outrage at particularly offensive conduct".
The huge costs associated with the death penalty are a very good argument for doing away with it -- as though the possibility of executing an innocent person weren't good enough on its own.