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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. [9] The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 restored the death penalty under federal law for drug offenses and some types of murder. [10]
The anti-death penalty movement began to pick up pace in the 1830s and many Americans called for abolition of the death penalty. Anti-death penalty sentiment rose as a result of the Jacksonian era, which condemned gallows and advocated for better treatment of orphans, criminals, poor people, and the mentally ill.
Opponents to the death penalty note that the lethal injection, the most common method of carrying out the death penalty, can oftentimes cause executed individuals to remain conscious for several minutes after administering the injection, causing them to feel severe pain in their veins. [288]
Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977) – The death penalty is unconstitutional for rape of an adult woman when the victim is not killed. Enmund v. Florida, 458 U.S. 782 (1982) – The death penalty is unconstitutional for a person who is a minor participant in a felony and does not kill, attempt to kill, or intend to kill. Tison v.
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".
Officials at the state Department of Juvenile Justice did not respond to questions about YSI. A department spokeswoman, Meghan Speakes Collins, pointed to overall improvements the state has made in its contract monitoring process, such as conducting more interviews with randomly selected youth to get a better understanding of conditions and analyzing problematic trends such as high staff turnover.
Death penalty opponents regard the death penalty as inhumane [206] and criticize it for its irreversibility. [207] They argue also that capital punishment lacks deterrent effect, [208] [209] [210] or has a brutalization effect, [211] [212] discriminates against minorities and the poor, and that it encourages a "culture of violence". [213]
The only way to absorb such experiences, Van Winkle writes, was to “make it impersonal and tell yourself you didn’t give a shit one way or another, even though you really did. It would eventually catch up to you. Sooner or later you’d have to contend with those sights and sounds, the blood and flies, but that wasn’t the place for remorse.