Issues of Capital Punishment and the Death Penalty

Twenty-six years ago, on July 2, 1976, the U.S. authoritative Court voted 7-2 in Gregg v. Georgia to reinstate the dying penalty after a brief official break. unuttered in the Gregg decision was the sanguine belief that the many problems place by a precedent Supreme Court decision, Furman v. Georgia, could be experienceed. In 1972, the Furman Court had infatuated down hundreds of state laws that the legal experts deemed illogical. nevertheless the majority in Gregg argued that verifiable standards would minimize impulsive decisions of the jurors and veer discrimination.\n\nA quarter-century and much than 700 executions later, the betoken of Gregg seems ridiculously naive. Greggs ambition was to ignore sentencing and ensure that dying sentences would be applied more equitably and only to the most horrible offenders. It hasnt worked out that way. Today in the United States, more than 3,700 work force and women await execution on termination row. The overwhelming bite of those put to death exit be poor, members of a minority, uneducated, or of questionable sanity, and they will go through been represented by any(prenominal) of the worst lawyers available. Clearly, it was absurd to embrace that the state legislatures that had crafted the unconstitutional laws criticized by the Furman decision would suddenly fix them. The death penalty should be abolished if it can not be administered fairly and impartially.\n\nObvious racial discrimination in the authorities of the death penalty stay routine. Nearly 90 part of the federal inmates on death row are minorities. Also, more than 76 percent of the cases, in which federal prosecutors had sought the death penalty during the previous 5 years, involved a defendant who belonged to a minority group. In the same study, U.S. attorneys were nearly double as likely to remember death for an African-American defendant than a Caucasian defendant (Clay 118-122).\n\nUnder the beliefs constituted by Gregg , you might conclude that this would be unconstitutional. You would be wrong. In the Gregg decision, the Supreme Court said that a constitutional violation was established if a plaintiff demo a pattern of peremptory and capricious sentencing. Since then, however, the Court appears to corroborate abandoned this logic. In 1987, for example, it rule that racial disparities are an unavoidable part of our criminal justice body. (Jackson 21-23).\n\nGrowing numbers of Americans sire begun to question the rationality of the system that executes people....If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website:

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