How can someone be sentenced to death

A Broken System Gregg v. When the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in by upholding new statutes in Georgia, Florida, and Texas, the Court in effect declared that all the problems that it had recognized four years earlier were now solved.

In fact, it is now clear, three decades later, that Gregg has not lived up to its promise. The death penalty remains arbitrary and capricious. Defendants continue to be convicted and sentenced to death based on such arbitrary factors as: their socioeconomic status and the socioeconomic status of the victim; their race and the race of the victim; where the crime occurred; or the poor quality of their counsel. Many death row inmates clearly suffer from mental retardation or mental illness. Even more dramatically, people have been released from death row in recent years because they were wrongfully convicted.

Death Penalty Disproportionate for Rape Coker v. Georgia : The Supreme Court ruled that the use of the death penalty in rape cases is unconstitutional because the sentence is disproportionate to the crime.

The Coker case resulted in the removal from death row of 20 inmates - three whites and 17 blacks. Consideration of Mitigation Factors Woodson v. North Carolina : The state of North Carolina enacted legislation that made the death penalty mandatory for all convicted first-degree murderers. Consequently, James Woodson was found guilty of such an offense and automatically sentenced to death. Woodson challenged the law, which the Supreme Court held that the statute failed to allow consideration of the character and record of an individual.

Lockett v. Ohio : An Ohio statute required that individuals found guilty of aggravated murder be sentenced to death. Sandra Lockett had encouraged and driven the getaway car for a robbery that resulted in the death of a pawnshop owner and was sentenced to death under this statute. The Supreme Court held that the statute was unconstitutional due to the fact that it did not allow the sentencing judge to consider mitigation factors in capital cases, which is required by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Racial Bias McCleskey v. The question of whether the death penalty might be used for crimes against the government, such as treason or espionage, remains unsettled. Many states allow all those who participated in a felony in which a death occurred to be charged with murder and possibly face the death penalty, even though they may not have directly killed anyone.

The case of unarmed accomplices in a bank robbery in which an employee is killed is a typical example of felony murder. Prisoners have also raised claims that the aggravating circumstances that make a crime eligible for the death penalty are too broad, with some state death-penalty laws encompassing nearly all murders, rather than reserving the death penalty for a small subset of murders. Compilations of state laws are available, along with notable court decisions regarding this issue.

Exercising an. The U. Q : If execution is unacceptable, what is the alternative? Convicted murderers can be sentenced to life imprisonment, as they are in many countries and states that have abolished the death penalty. Most state laws allow life sentences for murder that severely limit or eliminate the possibility of parole.

Today, 37 states allow juries to sentence defendants to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole instead of the death penalty. Several recent studies of public attitudes about crime and punishment found that a majority of Americans support alternatives to capital punishment: When people were presented with the facts about several crimes for which death was a possible punishment, a majority chose life imprisonment without parole as an appropriate alternative to the death penalty see PA.

Q : Isn't the Death Penalty necessary as just retribution for victims' families? Q : Have strict procedures eliminated arbitrariness and discrimination in death sentencing? Poor people are also far more likely to be death sentenced than those who can afford the high costs of private investigators, psychiatrists, and expert criminal lawyers.

Indeed, capital punishment is "a privilege of the poor," said Clinton Duffy, former warden at California's San Quentin Prison. Some observers have pointed out that the term "capital punishment" is ironic because "only those without capital get the punishment. Furthermore, study after study has found serious racial disparities in the charging, sentencing and imposition of the death penalty. People who kill whites are far more likely to receive a death sentence than those whose victims were not white, and blacks who kill whites have the greatest chance of receiving a death sentence.

Minorities are death-sentenced disproportionate to their numbers in the population. This is not primarily because minorities commit more murders, but because they are more often sentenced to death when they do.

Q : Maybe it used to happen that innocent people were mistakenly executed, but hasn't that possibility been eliminated? Since , people in 25 states have been released from death row because they were not guilty. In addition, seven people have been executed even though they were probably innocent. A study published in the Stanford Law Review documents capital convictions in this century, in which it was later proven that the convict had not committed the crime.

Of those, 25 convicts were executed while others spent decades of their lives in prison. Fifty-five of the cases took place in the s, and another 20 of them between l and l Our criminal justice system cannot be made fail-safe because it is run by human beings, who are fallible. Executions of innocent persons occur. Q : Only the worst criminals get sentenced to death, right? A : Wrong. Although it is commonly thought that the death penalty is reserved for those who commit the most heinous crimes, in reality only a small percentage of death-sentenced inmates were convicted of unusually vicious crimes.

The vast majority of individuals facing execution were convicted of crimes that are indistinguishable from crimes committed by others who are serving prison sentences, crimes such as murder committed in the course of an armed robbery.

The death penalty is like a lottery, in which fairness always loses.