Capital Penalty

Although it is exceedingly contentious, the death penalty has been a deep-rooted practice in the U.S. for nearly four decades. The first criminal execution took place in 1622 in Virginia. In the larger part of the 20th century, several states in the nation allowed the execution of convicted criminals (Marcus). Capital punishment can be traced to the early English common law, where practically every individual convicted of a crime was issued an obligatory death sentence. However, the death penalty has continued to prevail in the United States than in the United Kingdom, where capital punishment ended in 1973 (Marcus). Through the history of the U.S., the death penalty has encompassed crimes other than murder such as rape, arson, firearm possession in relation to violent offenses, kidnapping, armed robbery, and burglary. The timeline of capital punishment in the United States is based almost wholly on state criminal justice frameworks, rather than the federal system (Marcus). This could be explained by the fact that almost every significant violent crime that would result to a death sentence happens within the states and not the federal system. An evaluation of the occurrence of the death penalty in the U.S. is essentially that of male criminals, since female criminals contribute to a considerably limited number of persons that can be subjected to the capital punishment sentence (Marcus).