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Capital Punishment - Recurring Issues (From Legal Issues in Criminal Justice - The Courts, P 135-166, 1984, Sloan T Letman et al, eds. - See NCJ-92029)

NCJ Number
92033
Editor(s)
S T Letman, D W Edwards, D J Bell
Date Published
1984
Length
32 pages
Annotation
Capital punishment per se has not been declared cruel and unusual punishment nor a violation of any other constitutional principle, although the procedures by which the sentence is applied have received careful scrutiny; while many arguments have been mounted against capital punishment, they are not entirely persuasive.
Abstract
In Gregg v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court resolved the issue of the constitutionality of capital punishment by ruling that capital punishment per se is not cruel and unusual punishment. This case further resolved the procedural issues of how capital punishment could be constitutionally applied by validating the guided jury discretion statutes while overturning the mandatory sentencing statutes. Although arguments for the abolition of capital punishment have centered in a number of rationales such as the irreversibility of an erroneous conviction, capital punishment's ineffectiveness in deterring crime, the denial of an opportunity for the offender to be rehabilitated, and its inequitable application, the arguments for and against capital punishment must be based in whether or not it is a moral action. Those who favor the abolition of capital punishment based on biblical tenets must exclude or ignore passages advocating capital punishment in Israelite society, and those who argue that capital punishment violates the concept of forgiveness advocated in the Bible fail to appreciate that persons must bear the consequences of their behavior even though they may be forgiven for it. Capital punishment may be considered moral in its being the ultimate punishment for particularly heinous crimes that inflict death and particularly painful emotional and physical suffering on others. One hundred notes are provided.

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