Capital Punishment - History

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during the reigns of King Canute (1016-1035) and William the Conqueror (1066-1087) was the death penalty not used, although the results of interrogation and torture were often fatal (Kronenwetter 12). Later, Britain reinstated the death penalty and brought it to its American colonies.
Although the death was widely accepted throughout the early United States, not everyone approved of it. In the late-eighteen century, opposition to the death penalty gathered enough strength to lead to important restrictions on the use of the death penalty in several northern states, while in the United States, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island abandoned the practice altogether (Kronenwetter 15). In 1794, Pennsylvania adopted a law to distinguish the degrees of murder and only used the death penalty for premeditated first-degree murder. Another reform took place in 1846 in Louisiana. This state abolished the mandatory death penalty and authorized the option of sentencing a capital offender to life ...

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Most of us assume that we execute murderers primarily because we believe it will discourage others from becoming murderers. Retentionists have long asserted the deterrent power of capital punishment as an obvious fact. The fear of death deters people from committing crimes. Still, abolitionists (people against capital punishment) believe that deterrence is little more than an assumption-and a naive assumption at that.

Abolitionists claim that capital punishment does not deter murderers from killing or killing again. They base most of their argument against deterrence on statistics. States that use it extensively show a higher murder rate than those that have abolished the death ...

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