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The United States is the only Western industrialized country in the world to still apply capital punishmentcapital punishment, also known as the death penaltydeath penaltysee capital punishment. While the trend worldwide in the last half century has been the abolition of capital punishment as the ultimate way of punishing convicted criminals, the United States is still among the nations of the world (along with ChinaChina, Iran, IraqIraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) with the highest annual number of actual executions. As with abortionabortion, the laws about capital punishment vary from state to state although the federal government can also impose the death penalty as a punishment for some crimes like treason. In more than half of all states capital punishment is legal although in reality the vast majority of executions have taken place in only five states: TexasTexas, VirginiaVirginia, OklahomaOklahoma, MissouriMissouri, and FloridaFlorida.

Supreme CourtSupreme Court decisionsAs with abortionabortion, to understand American attitudes towards capital punishmentcapital punishment we’ll need to start with a Supreme CourtSupreme Court decision made in the early 70s (the same time as the decision legalizing abortion). In Furman v. GeorgiaFurman v.Georgia a narrow majority of justices ruled that the state laws in GeorgiaGeorgia violated the 8^th and 14^th Amendment14th Amendments to the ConstitutionConstitution, which prohibit cruel and unusual punishment and prohibit the government from depriving citizens of life, liberty, or property without “due process of lawdue process of law.” After some states revised their laws to take into account this decision, the Supreme Court ruled just a few years later in Gregg v. GeorgiaGregg v.Georgia that capital punishment as applied under these new laws wasn’t unconstitutional. The first execution after this decision took place in UtahUtah in 1977: Gary GilmoreGilmore, Gary was executed by firing squad, the most unusual method of execution. Lethal injection has been used in the overwhelming majority of executions in the last ten years. In more recent cases the Supreme Court has further restricted capital punishment using the principle of the “evolving standards of decencyevolving standards of decency” and declaring the execution of minors and the mentally retarded to be unconstitutional. Although there is evidence that racerace plays a role in convictions and executions, the Supreme Court has mostly ruled in favor of execution if racial discrimination can’t be proved while acknowledging that the way capital punishment is applied could indicate this kind of discrimination. The Court has upheld laws permitting the use of lethal [81]injectionlethal injections as long as the injections didn’t inflict unnecessary pain – “cruel and unusual punishment” is, as we saw above, prohibited by the 8^th Amendment8th Amendment.

consistent support in the US, increased abolition by statesCapital punishment is still supported by a majority of Americans although the results of opinion polls depend on how the questions are asked. Because all people convicted have the right to appeal and because the appeals process starts at the state level and then can proceed through all the higher courts and even up to the Supreme CourtSupreme Court, there is often a long waiting period between conviction and execution. While some laws have been passed to speed up the process between conviction and execution, widespread use of DNA evidence has also helped to reverse convictions of people on death row and has led to an official moratorium on the use of capital punishmentcapital punishment in IllinoisIllinois as well as increased hesitation to perform executions in other states. New JerseyNew Jersey became the first state in many years to formally abolish the death penaltydeath penaltysee capital punishment in 2007 followed by five other states in the subsequent eight years. The number of death sentences and the number of executions nationwide has decreased since the turn of the millennium. The support for capital punishment has remained high among Americans as a whole – very few major presidential candidates have ever openly opposed the death penalty. More than 150 executions took place in TexasTexas when George W. BushBush, George W. was governor; as presidentpresident he also clearly supported capital punishment. Barack ObamaObama, Barack once admitted that his views on capital punishment were very complicated. He has criticized the way in which the death penalty was administered but has also justified its use for certain crimes that society considered outrageous. Other explanations for American support of capital punishment can include general arguments for capital punishment: deterrence to other possible criminals, sense of justice for the victims’ families, and prevention of further harm to others. Other reasons could include an American frontier mentality with general beliefs in clear-cut guilt or innocence, perhaps an American tendency to want quick solutions to complex problems. Since the use of capital punishment falls under the jurisdiction of each individual state, only the Supreme Court could ban its practice in all states on constitutional grounds, an unlikely event in the near future. Capital punishment will thus most probably remain one of those issues that divide the US from Europe.

little support in the UKAlthough capital punishmentcapital punishment wasn’t finally and completely [82]abolished in the UK until 1998, the last executions took place in the mid 60s. While some polling seems to indicate support for reinstating capital punishment in Britain, a return to the death penaltydeath penaltysee capital punishmentwould be impossible as long as the UK remains part of the EU and continues to support the European Convention on Human RightsEuropean Convention on Human Rights, both of which are adamantly against capital punishment.