Capital punishment debate in the United States

[5] Abolitionists gathered support for their claims from writings by European Enlightenment philosophers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire (who became convinced the death penalty was cruel and unnecessary[6]) and Bentham.

Anti-death penalty sentiment rose as a result of the Jacksonian era, which condemned gallows and advocated for better treatment of orphans, criminals, poor people, and the mentally ill.

In an 1898 op-ed in The New York Times, prominent physician Austin Flint called for the abolition of the death penalty and suggested more criminology-based methods should be used to reduce crime.

They also organized campaigns for legislative abolition and developed a research team which looked into empirical evidence surrounding issues such as death penalty deterrence and racial discrimination within the capital punishment process.

Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund launched a major campaign challenging the death penalty's constitutionality and insisted a moratorium for all executions while it was in process.

Some of the most influential organizations who continue to work against capital punishment today include Amnesty International USA, the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Finally, many contemporary arguments focus on the greater cost of the death penalty compared to alternate sentences, which has attracted strong support in some state legislatures.

In 2005 in the Stanford Law Review, John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that the death penalty "is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors.

[36] Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University, authored a study that looked at all 3,054 U.S. counties over death penalty on many different grounds.

[37] Emory University law professor Joanna M. Shepherd, who has contributed to multiple studies on capital punishment and deterrence, has said, "I am definitely against the death penalty on lots of different grounds.

[45][46][47] However, critics claim severe methodological flaws in these studies and hold that the empirical data offer no basis for sound statistical conclusions about the deterrent effect.

[49] Surveys and polls conducted in the last 15 years show that some police chiefs and others involved in law enforcement may not believe that the death penalty has any deterrent effect on individuals who commit violent crimes.

They ranked it behind many other forms of crime control including reducing drug abuse and use, lowering technical barriers when prosecuting, putting more officers on the streets, and making prison sentences longer.

"[52] Maimonides argued that executing a defendant on anything less than absolute certainty would lead to a slippery slope of decreasing burdens of proof, until we would be convicting merely "according to the judge's caprice."

[53] Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, both of Harvard law school, however, have argued that if there is a deterrent effect it will save innocent lives, which gives a life-life tradeoff.

Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life.The extent to which the deterrence argument is well-founded, however, is far from the only interesting and important aspect of this common justification of capital punishment.

In fact, current conceptualizations of the deterrence argument are also paramount, insofar as they implicitly operate under the assumption that the media and publicity are integral to shaping individuals' awareness and understandings of capital punishment.

Norman Frink, a senior deputy district attorney in the state of Oregon, considers capital punishment a valuable tool for prosecutors.

[63] In a plea agreement reached with Washington state prosecutors, Gary Ridgway, a Seattle-area man who admitted to 48 murders since 1982, accepted a sentence of life in prison without parole in 2003.

More specifically, the media simplifies complex cases by ensuring news stories adhere to generally taken-for-granted, preexisting cultural understandings of capital crimes.

[73] A 209 thematic content analysis of Associated Press articles finds that the media frames the death penalty in a way that portrays capital punishment as being overly fair, palatable, and simple.

[75] The media's increased focus on innocent people's wrongful convictions, referred to as the 'innocence frame,' has highlighted larger fallibilities within the justice system; it has contributed to a decline in public support of the death penalty.

In particular, they point to the systemic presence of racial, socio-economic, geographic, and gender bias in its implementation as evidence of how the practice is illegitimate and in need of suspension or abolition.

According to Craig Rice, a black member of the Maryland state legislature: "The question is, are more people of color on death row because the system puts them there or are they committing more crimes because of unequal access to education and opportunity?

In Ford v. Wainwright,[92] the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the state from carrying out the death penalty on an individual who is insane, and that properly raised issues of execution-time sanity must be determined in a proceeding satisfying the minimum requirements of due process.

However, the recent case of Teresa Lewis, the first woman executed in Virginia since 1912, proved to be very controversial because Governor Bob McDonnell refused to commute her sentence to life imprisonment, even though she had an IQ of 70.

[95][96] In theory, opponents of capital punishment might argue that as a matter of principle, death penalties collide with the substance of Madison's understanding on democratic rule.

Donald McCartin, an Orange County, California jurist famous for sending nine men to death row during his career, said that "it's 10 times more expensive to kill [criminals] than to keep them alive.

"[98] McCartin's estimate is actually low, according to a June 2011 study by former death penalty prosecutor and federal judge Arthur L. Alarcón, and law professor Paula Mitchell.

[104] Statistics likely understate the actual problem of wrongful convictions because once an execution has occurred there is often insufficient motivation and finance to keep a case open, and it becomes unlikely at that point that the miscarriage of justice will ever be exposed.