Six in ten adults in the United States support the death penalty for convicted murderers, according to the April 2021 survey. A similar proportion (64%) say the death penalty is morally justified when a person commits a crime such as murder. The death penalty is cruel and unusual. It is cruel because it is a relic of the early days of the penal system, when slavery, marking and other corporal punishment were commonplace. Like these barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society. This is unusual because, of all the Western industrialized nations, only the United States participates in this punishment. It is also unusual because only a random sample of convicted murderers in the United States receives the death penalty. It is widely reported that the American public overwhelmingly supports the death penalty. However, closer analysis of public attitudes shows that most Americans prefer an alternative; They would oppose the death penalty if convicted murderers were sentenced to life in prison without parole and had to pay some form of financial compensation. In 2010, when California voters were asked what sentence they preferred for a first-degree murderer, 42 percent of registered voters said they preferred life without parole and 41 percent said they preferred the death penalty.
In 2000, when voters were asked the same question, 37% chose life without parole, while 44% chose the death penalty. A 1993 national poll found that while 77 percent of the public supports the death penalty, support drops to 56 percent if the alternative is a non-parole sentence of up to 25 years in prison. Support drops even more to 49% if the alternative is not probation. And if the alternative is not probation plus restoration, it drops even more, to 41%. Only a minority of the American public would support the death penalty if such alternatives were proposed. Opponents of the death penalty argue that the death penalty is more often applied against offenders from racial and ethnic minorities and from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds than against criminals from privileged backgrounds; and that the victim`s background also influences the outcome. [186] [187] [188] Researchers have shown that white Americans are more likely to support the death penalty when told that it is primarily applied to African Americans,[189] and that more stereotypical black or dark-skinned defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death if the case involves a white victim. [190] In 1972, the Supreme Court stated that under the laws in force at the time, “the imposition and execution of the death penalty . constitutes cruel and unusual punishment that violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. (Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S.
238). The court focused its objections on how the death penalty laws had been enforced, deeming the result so “harsh, crazy and arbitrary” that it was constitutionally unacceptable. To make the national impact of its decision unambiguous, the court overturned death sentences in the many cases pending at the time, which involved a variety of laws, crimes, and state acts. On October 11, 2018, Washington State became the 20th state to abolish the death penalty when the state Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional due to racial bias. [59] To impose a death sentence, the jury must be guided by the particular circumstances of the criminal, and the court must have conducted an individual criminal trial. In Ring v. Arizona, 536 USA 584 (2002), the Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional for “a sentencing judge sitting without a jury to consider an aggravating circumstance necessary for the imposition of the death penalty”. [35] Death penalty figures, Amnesty International, www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty/numbers.
[31] See David Wallace-Wells, What is Death Row Syndrome?, Slate, February 1, 2005, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2005/02/what_is_death_row_syndrome.html; Smith, op. cit. cit., note 30. In Turkey, more than 500 people were sentenced to death after the 1980 Turkish coup. About 50 of them were executed, the last on 25 October 1984. Then there was a de facto moratorium on the death penalty in Turkey. As a step towards EU membership, Turkey has made some legal changes. The death penalty was abolished by the National Assembly in peacetime in August 2002, and in May 2004 Turkey amended its constitution to abolish the death penalty at all costs. It ratified Protocol No. 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights in February 2006.
As a result, Europe is, in practice, a continent where the death penalty is free of charge, with all States except Russia, which has concluded a moratorium after ratifying the Sixth Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights, with the sole exception of Belarus, which is not a member of the Council of Europe. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe campaigned for Council of Europe observer states that practice the death penalty, the United States and Japan, to abolish it or lose their observer status. In addition to banning the death penalty for EU member states, the EU has also prohibited the transfer of detainees in cases where the receiving party can request the death penalty. The 27 states with the death penalty for murder offer lethal injections as the primary method of execution. The rest of Vermont`s death penalty law for treason provides for electrocution as a method of execution. [73] About 13.5% of death row inmates are Hispanic or Latino of any race. In 2019, people identified as Hispanic and Latino of any race accounted for 5.5% of homicides. [159] The death penalty admonition rate for Hispanics and Latinos is 8.6%. [158] Social historians note that beginning in the 20th century, in the United States and Western Europe in general, death was increasingly protected from the public and increasingly took place behind closed hospital doors. [136] Executions also took place behind prison walls.
[136] The last official public executions took place in Britain in 1868, in the United States in 1936, and in France in 1939. [136] Murder Victim Groups Family members recently supported campaigns to abolish the death penalty in Illinois, Connecticut, Montana, and Maryland. In neighbouring states – both with no death penalty – the state that practices the death penalty does not always have a consistently lower rate of criminal homicides. For example, between l990 and l994, murder rates in Wisconsin and Iowa (no death penalty states) were half as high as in neighboring Illinois – which reintroduced the death penalty in l973 and sentenced 223 people to death and carried out two executions in 1994. Between 2000 and 2010, the homicide rate in states with the death penalty was 25 to 46 per cent higher than in states where the death penalty was applied. In recent years, it has been argued that this blatant racial discrimination is a thing of the past.