Death Penalty Constitutionality

The death penalty, also known as capital punishment, is punishment by death for a convicted crime. American’s often consider it a controversial topic, especially in terms of its constitutionality. This paper aims to outline the constitutionality of the death penalty and argues that it is unconstitutional because it contradicts the Eighth and Sixth Amendments of the Constitution.
The Constitution outlines the framework of the United States Federal government with the intent to unite states with different history, interests, cultures, and laws. The first ten amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights. The amendments define the rights of citizens and states in relation to the Federal Government. The Eighth and Sixth Amendment
The death penalty dates as far back to the eighteenth century B.C. during the code of King Hammaurabi of Babylon. During the fifth century B.C., The punishment for all crimes was death. Executioners executed offenders creatively, including crucifixion, drowning, beating to death, burning alive, and impalement. In the tenth century A.D., hanging was the preferred method of execution in Britain. By the sixteenth century, the British Government executed people who married Jews, who failed to confess to crimes, and who committed treason. By the 1700s, over 200 crimes were punishable by death in Britain, such as stealing, cutting down a tree, and robbing a rabbit warren (The Death Penalty, 2012). However, many juries at that time felt as though crimes like these were not serious enough to warrant the death penalty, leading Britain Government to eliminate the death penalty from over 100 crimes in the early and mid 1800s. Britain influenced America’s use of the death penalty. The first recorded execution was in the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, where Captain George Kendall was executed for being a spy for Spain. The death penalty evolved differently in each colony. In the New York Colony, for example, judges followed Duke's Laws of 1665 (The Death Penalty, 2012). Under this law, offenses like hitting someone’s mother or father, or denying the “true
Unlike other types of punishment considered “usual,” the death sentence is irreversible. However, there are many cases of prisoners who were sentenced to death row and were later exonerated for false evidence, witnesses lying on the stand, etc. In one case, Cameron Willingham was convicted of murdering his three children by arson in a 1991 house fire. He was executed in 2004. But a new report from a national arson expert, prepared for the Texas Forensic Science Commission, had concluded that the original investigation of Willingham's case was seriously flawed and could not support a finding of arson (Mills, 2009). In January 2016, the federal Supreme Court deemed Florida’s capital sentencing law to be unconstitutional because “the Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death” (Eckholm, 2016). Cases like that of Florida are not uncommon; while the jury votes on the case as a whole, each jury member is unlikely to have agreed on the veracity of each individual piece of evidence. Furthermore, modern day forensics and technologies are constantly uncovering new ways to gather evidence that can be presented by in a court case. A simple DNA test could exonerate someone who was found guilty eighty years ago, before such