The death penalty, also known as capital punishment, has been and is still a highly debated issue in society. While many nations around the world have abolished the death penalty as a form of punishment, some nations still emphasize its importance as a valid means for punishing specific types of crimes. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the death penalty on the families of the executed, families of the murder victim and the executed or murderer. This paper is an in-depth analysis of various facts and evidence focusing on the death penalty in the USA. Special attention is paid to the 31 states whose laws permit death penalty as a form of punishment. The evidence reviewed indicates that capital punishment impacts seriously all members of the families involved on both sides, victim and perpetrator, and the entire American society. Specifically, the evidence shows that most of the children of the executed face emotional and financial problems while some of them.
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International Symposium on Violence Reduction in Theory & Practice, presented by the Colloquium on Violence & Religion at Emory University, June 3-5, 1999
While it may be painfully obvious that the practice of the death penalty is a scapegoating mechanism, using the selection of a few people from a larger population of putative murderers for state-sanctioned execution, whether there are any strictly legal consequences of that fact have not been considered by lawyers or addressed by the legal system. I expand on the view, not original to myself, that the death penalty, as a ritual which is religious by its character and ancestry, violates the First Amendment proscription against the “establishment of religion.” This is not only an argument for courts to consider, it is a question for our society to consider in understanding its craving for the death penalty.
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The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States
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British Journal of American Legal Studies
Within the United States, legal challenges to the death penalty have held it to be a "cruel and unusual" punishment (contrary to the Eighth Amendment) or arbitrarily and unfairly enacted (contrary to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments). The Eighth Amendment requires that punishments not be disproportionate or purposeless. In recent rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court has adopted a piecemeal approach to this matter. In regard to particular classes of defendant, the Court has sought to rule on whether death is likely to be a proportional and purposeful punishment, as well as whether-given the condition of these defendants-such a determination can be reliably and accurately gauged. This article will suggest a different approach. Instead of asking whether, given the nature of certain categories of human defendant, the death penalty is constitutional in their case, I will begin by asking what-given the nature of the U.S. death penalty-one must believe about human beings for death to be a proportionate punishment. From this, I will argue that to believe that these penal goals are capable of fulfilment by the death penalty entails commitment to an empirically unconfirmable philosophical anthropology. On this basis, it will be further argued that the beliefs required for the U.S. death penalty's proportional and purposeful instigation (pursuant to the Eighth Amendment) are not congruent with the demands of legal due process.
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Psychology, Public Policy and Law
