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Indiana followed Florida in 1977 and enacted a similar death penalty scheme in which the jury's sentence recommendation was not binding. There were no directions on when the judge could override the jury's life sentence until 1989, when the Indiana Supreme Court held that the override was permitted only when "virtually no reasonable person could disagree that death was appropriate".
Most legal determinations of death in the developed world are made by medical professionals who pronounce death when specific criteria are met. [4] Two categories of legal death are death determined by irreversible cessation of heartbeat (cardiopulmonary death), and death determined by irreversible cessation of functions of the brain (brain death).
The sentence ordering that an offender be punished in such a manner is known as a death sentence, and the act of carrying out the sentence is known as an execution. A prisoner who has been sentenced to death and awaits execution is condemned and is commonly referred to as being "on death row". Etymologically, the term capital (lit.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the top three factors determining whether a convict gets a death sentence in a murder case are not aggravating factors, but instead the location the crime occurred (and thus whether it is in the jurisdiction of a prosecutor aggressively using the death penalty), the quality of legal defense ...
Every death sentence involves first an eligibility determination and then a selection of an eligible defendant for the death penalty. A defendant is eligible for the death penalty once the jury has concluded that he is a member of that narrow class of criminal defendants who have committed the most morally outrageous of crimes.
In the late 1980s, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, from New York State, sponsored a bill to make certain federal drug crimes eligible for the death penalty as he was frustrated by the lack of a death penalty in his home state. [11] The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 restored the death penalty under federal law for drug offenses and some types of murder. [12]
The suspended death sentence in Chinese law gives the accused a two-year reprieve from being executed, after which it is automatically converted to life imprisonment, or more rarely, fixed-term ...
An unnatural cause of death results from an external cause, typically including homicides, suicides, accidents, medical errors, alcohol intoxications and drug overdoses. [6] [7] Jurisdictions differ in how they categorize and report unnatural deaths, including level of detail and whether they are considered a single category with subcategories, or separate top-level categories.