Issues of Capital Punishment and the Death Penalty

Twenty-six years ago, on July 2, 1976, the U.S. sovereign Court voted 7-2 in Gregg v. Georgia to reinstate the finish penalty after a brief official break. unverbalized in the Gregg decision was the rose-colored belief that the many problems place by a front Supreme Court decision, Furman v. Georgia, could be emplacemented. In 1972, the Furman Court had ena more thand down hundreds of state laws that the arbiters deemed illogical. further the majority in Gregg argued that intent standards would minimize impulsive decisions of the jurors and dress discrimination.\n\nA quarter-century and more than 700 executions later, the foreknow of Gregg seems ridiculously naive. Greggs ambition was to absolve sentencing and ensure that finis sentences would be applied more equitably and only to the most frightful offenders. It hasnt worked out that way. Today in the United States, more than 3,700 manpower and women await execution on stopping point row. The overwhelming exit of t hose put to death result be poor, members of a minority, uneducated, or of questionable sanity, and they will stomach been represented by few of the worst lawyers available. Clearly, it was absurd to absorb that the state legislatures that had crafted the unconstitutional laws criticized by the Furman decision would suddenly fix them. The death penalty should be abolished if it can not be administered fairly and impartially.\n\nObvious racial discrimination in the organization of the death penalty ashes routine. Nearly 90 part of the federal inmates on death row are minorities. Also, more than 76 percent of the cases, in which federal prosecutors had sought the death penalty during the previous vanadium years, involved a suspect who belonged to a minority group. In the same study, U.S. attorneys were nearly in two ways as likely to barrack death for an African-American defendant than a Caucasian defendant (Clay 118-122).\n\nUnder the beliefs complete by Gregg, you might conclude that this would be unconstitutional. You would be wrong. In the Gregg decision, the Supreme Court said that a constitutional violation was established if a plaintiff present a pattern of arbitrary and capricious sentencing. Since then, however, the Court appears to defecate abandoned this logic. In 1987, for example, it govern that racial disparities are an needful part of our criminal justice trunk. (Jackson 21-23).\n\nGrowing numbers of Americans choose begun to question the rationality of the system that executes people....If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website:

Need assistance with such assignment as write my paper? Feel free to contact our highly qualified custom paper writers who are always eager to help you complete the task on time.