Criminal Punishment Program Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Criminal Punishment Program - Research Paper Example In June 1972, Furman v. Georgia reduced the support for death penalty, when the Supreme Court held capital punishment to be unconstitutional and voided 40 death penalty statutes. Several more rulings questioned the constitutionality of capital punishment, though many states continue the program. This paper discusses the history and outcomes of death penalty in the U.S. It also uses applicable criminological theories that help explain the different results of capital punishment programs. Despite scholarly evidence and arguments that showed that death penalty does not deter the incidence of violent crimes, majority of Americans continue to support it and other studies prove its deterrence. History of Death Penalty in the United States The first death penalty laws can be dated to eighteenth century B.C. in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, which applied the death penalty for twenty-five kinds of crimes. Britain influenced American death penalty because the English brought this prog ram with them to the New World. The first person who was executed through capital punishment was Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608 (DPIC, 2013). Kendall was put to death for being a spy for Spain. The abolition movement for death penalty began during the colonial times too. Montesquieu, Voltaire and Bentham wrote against it, although the most prominent opposition came from Cesare Beccaria’s 1767 essay, On Crimes and Punishment (DPIC, 2013). Beccaria argued that no one can justify the state’s execution of human lives. Throughout the nineteenth century, death penalty witnessed different reforms, aside from abolition in some states. Instead of being applied in all crimes, for instance, it was applied to capital crimes in a number of states. After the Civil War, new means of execution developed. The electric chair was developed and used at the end of the nineteenth century. New York made its first electric chair, which was first used on Wil liam Kemmler (DPIC, 2013). Other states followed this technology. The early and middle twentieth century witnessed the ups and downs of the capital punishment program. From 1907 to 1917, six states banned the death penalty, while three reduced it to cases concerning treason and first degree murder of a law enforcement official (DPIC, 2013). These reforms were cut short because of the Russian Revolution and World War I, where five of the six abolitionist states reapplied death penalty in 1920. The 1960s and the 1970s tested the constitutionality of the capital punishment program. In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled in Trop v. Dulles (356 U.S. 86) that the Eighth Amendment embodied an â€Å"evolving standard of decency that marked the progress of a maturing society† (DPIC, 2013). In 1972, Furman v. Georgia, Jackson v. Georgia, and Branch v. Texas led to the Supreme Court asserting that death penalty is arbitrary. In Furman, the Supreme Court created the standard that a punishment would be â€Å"cruel and unusual,† if it was too severe for the crime, if it was capricious, if it offended society's sense of justice, or it if was not more effective than a less harsh penalty (DPIC, 2013). At present, the United States numbers of death sentences are gradually falling from 300 in 1998 to 106 in 2009 (DPIC, 2013). Though execution rates are declining, Gallup poll shows that the majority of Americans continue to favor capital punishment. In its 2012 survey, 63% of those surveyed supported death penalty