Tide may be turning for U.S. -Graphic: A Short History of U.S. Capital Punishment

Goober

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Jan 23, 2009
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Tide may be turning for U.S. capital punishment as recent votes reveal states divided on life and death issue | National Post
Lawyers for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev applied this week to add a death penalty expert to his defence team, in expectation the United States will seek capital punishment for the accused Boston Marathon terrorist.

Prosecutors in Ohio, meanwhile, are still deciding whether to seek the same for Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro.

Texas last month gave a lethal dose of pentobarbital to Kimberly Lagayle McCarthy, 52, for the 1997 robbery and murder of her neighbour, Dorothy Booth, 71, a retired psychology professor. The crime was so brutal that, after asking for a cup of sugar, McCarthy attacked Ms. Booth with a knife and a candelabra, and cut off her finger to steal her wedding ring.

The crack addict and former wife of a founder of the radical New Black Panther Party was suspected in two other deaths. She became the 500th person to be executed in Texas since 1982 (the 502nd was carried out Thursday), six years after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment after a four-year legal moratorium.

Since then, America has become an outlier among industrialized nations: it is the only executioner in the New World, alone with Japan in the Group of Seven and Belarus in the Organization for Security & Cooperation in Europe.

Public support for capital punishment remains strong, solidly 60% in both the U.S. and Canada, which abolished it in 1976, and came within two dozen House of Commons votes of reinstating it in 1987.

But there are signs this modern period of American justice might not last. In March, Maryland became the most recent of five states in six years to abolish capital punishment.

What these votes have revealed is a country formally divided, state against state, on a life and death issue.

Graphic: A Short History of U.S. Capital Punishment
More than 15,000 people have been executed in the United States going back to colonial times. Witches, slaves, pirates and murderers have all been executed by a variety of methods, including gibbeting and being pressed to death. Of late, it is murderers being executed, most commonly by lethal injection. Texas is the state that has used capital punishment the most since 1976.
The National Post takes a look at the history and demographics of the United States’ death penalty.

 

damngrumpy

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Mar 16, 2005
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The problem with the current death penalty issue is that it's used in the wrong way.
People are condemned to death for reasons that don't warrant it and others walk
away with their lives. In the case of the Boston bomber, here is a case where the
guy deserves it.