Capital Punishment In The 1800s

Introduction
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is defined as the physical execution of a person by the state as punishment for a crime. The existence of the death penalty dates as early as the eighteenth century B.C. in the Code of King Hammaurabi of Babylon. The code outlines twenty-five different crimes for which the death penalty was applied. At this time, the means by which the death penalty was enacted included crucifixion, drowning, beating to death, burning alive, and impalement. However, by the tenth century A.D., hanging became the primary execution method in Britain. During the time of William the Conqueror in the eleventh century, executions took place only in times of war. This period ended in the sixteenth century
under the reign of Henry VIII, where an estimated 72,000 people were executed.
Hanging was still a common method of execution, along with boiling, burning at the stake, drawing and quartering, and beheading. By the 1700s, the number of crimes punishable by death rose to 222, which later would induce reforms to Britain’s death penalty statutes during the 1800s. Britain has a long history of the use of the death penalty with American ideals at its foundation. Although death sentences have been carried out throughout human history, the first execution in the United States was of “Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608. Kendall was executed for being a spy for Spain.” Despite the numerous executions taking place in America, laws regarding the death penalty did not arise until the New York Colony instituted the Duke Laws of 1665. The death penalty had been established in the United States and did not encounter any major changes for
years to come. History The first major changes to capital punishment in the United States occurred in Pennsylvania where the death penalty was repealed for all offenses except first degree murder in 1794 as a result of pressure from the public eye. Eventually, in 1834, executions were only to be performed in correctional facilities. Soon, some states, such as Rhode Island and Wisconsin, completely abolished the death penalty, and many others passed “laws against mandatory death sentencing.” Other than a few rarely committed crimes, “all mandatory capital punishment laws had been abolished by 1963.” The first electric chair was built in New York in 1888. William Kemmler, a convicted murderer, was the first person to be executed by this method in 1890. This method was soon adopted by many states instead of the previously more common methods, including hangings or a firing squad. The use of the death penalty had begun to decrease despite a brief resurgence from the 1920s to the 1940s, with numbers dropping from 1,289 executions in the 1940s to only 191 from 1960 to 1976. In the 1960s, Supreme Court cases ensued as “it was suggested that the death penalty was a “cruel and unusual” punishment and therefore unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment,” leading to a ten-year moratorium on executions that ended with the execution of Gary Gilmore by firing squad on January 17, 1977. More standards arose in the case Gregg v. Georgia when the Supreme Court held that the death penalty did indeed align with the constitution. Following the various cases regarding capital punishment, Oklahoma became the first state to adopt lethal injection as a means of execution, with the first lethal injection execution administered to Charles Brooks in Texas on December 7, 1982. Similar to the electric chair, this method was soon adopted by many other states. Through numerous Supreme Court case decisions, limits were placed on the death penalty, including a ban on executing death row inmates who had mental disabilities, excluding race as a factor when determining a death sentence, and not executing those under 18 years of age.
To constitute even more standards, “in 1994, President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that expanded the federal death penalty to some sixty crimes.” Offenses punishable by death were extended to include treason, murdering a government official, kidnapping resulting in death, and the running of a large-scale drug enterprise. Despite the countless crimes for which the death penalty could be applied, women have historically received the death penalty at a lesser rate to men, with only about three percent of executions being females. In fact, in more recent years, this percentage has dwindled even further, with only about one percent of the people executed in the United States being women. Besides less women put to death, capital punishment has continued to decline for many years as an exceeding amount of convicts are placed in correctional facilities in attempts to be rehabilitated. The public is constantly debating the ethical dilemma surrounding the issue of taking another person's life and for what crimes such a punishment is acceptable for the common
good.
Execution
There are many forms of execution used when enacting the death penalty. Up until the late nineteenth century, hanging was the leading method applied in the United States. In the present day, only Washington and Delaware still hang people, but both practice lethal injection as an alternative method of execution. Compared to earlier times, the procedures are far less torturous than being eaten by animals, being stoned, and being burned alive. As of 2016, there are eighteen states where capital punishment is legal, and thirty-two where it is illegal. To break this down even further, the Southern states tend to use this punishment the most, with Texas and Oklahoma responsible for 640 of the 1,415 executions since 1976. The United States Government has sanctioned forty-one crimes that are punishable by death. These capital punishments range from espionage to treason to murder.
In 1642, Thomas Graunger was the first juvenile to be put to death by hanging in the United States. After this initial execution, more than 370 juvenile convicts have been executed. With the case of Thompson v. Oklahoma in 1988, the United States Supreme Court decided that it was illegal to sentence any person younger than sixteen years of age to death. Seventeen years later in 2005, the Roper v. Simmons case set precedent that it was illegal to execute a person younger than eighteen years old. In the case Glossip v. Gross in 2015, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that “To be unconstitutional, a method of execution must involve any risk of harm which is substantial when compared to a known and available alternative method.” The laws concerning capital punishment in the United States are very specific, but still leave room for interpretation under the U.S. Constitution.
In regards to gender inequalities in criminal law, the discrimination has remained relatively consistent throughout the years. Men and women alike can be charged with similar crimes, and both can receive our country’s most grave punishment, the death penalty. In spite of this, there are still a number of discrepancies in terms of men and women punished to death. In general, males are sentenced to the death penalty more often than females. Since reinstating the death penalty in 1976, only sixteen women have been executed from death row, compared to 1,399 men. This extreme difference between men and women can be attributed to the fact that women commit less murders than men. According to the Huffington Post, “women account for 10 percent of the arrests for murder” although “only 1.1 percent of women are eventually executed.” This variance can be connected to the way women are viewed in the courtroom, as jurors can be easily convinced that women are more emotionally distraught and fragile than men, and thus cannot handle the severity of capital punishment.