There is an ongoing crucial debate within the criminal justice system as to the moral status of the death penalty. Retentionists hold that the death penalty is morally justified; abolitionists argue that it is not. Proponents of the death penalty...

Capital punishment, accompanied by torture, is widely applied and taken for granted in most pre-industrial societies, past and present (see, e.g. Diamond 1971). In modern industrial societies there has been a tendency towards decreasing severity of...

Although capital punishment has historically been universal, and although the range of crimes for which it has sometimes been seen as suitable is wide, opposition to the death penalty is not as recent as is often imagined. Some European countries...

According to scripture, the death penalty was invoked for murder, *blasphemy, *adultery, various sexual crimes, *idolatry, desecration of the *Sabbath, witchcraft, kidnapping and dishonouring parents. Two witnesses must testify to the crime and the...

Capital punishment debate Religion and capital punishment Wrongful...

JUSTICE For the past 30 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has focused considerable attention toward providing the determination, modification and clarification of capital punishment legal issues and the imposition of the death penalty for capital crimes. These decisions have predominantly addressed state penal...

In view of the resurgence of capital punishment in the United States we thought MR readers might be interested in Marx's observations in a dispatch from him that appeared in the New York Daily Tribune of February 17, 1853. The occasion for writing...

Stop executions for a while and perhaps they can be stopped forever. That calculation has been part of the strategy of capital punishment opponents for decades.The Supreme Court-inspired slowdown in executions offers the first nationwide opportunity in 20-plus years to test whether the absence of...

The number of death sentences meted out by Chinese courts has dropped since legislation was introduced requiring the approval of the country's highest court before anyone is executed, state media said Friday.The amendment to China's capital punishment law, enacted in November, was a step forward...

In the spring of 1993, Morris Gauger and his wife, Ruth Gauger, were bludgeoned and stabbed to death on their family farm near Richmond, Illinois. Their son, forty-year-old Gary Gauger, phoned 911 after he and a friend discovered his father's body on...

In the summer of 1984, a young girl was kidnapped, raped, and murdered near her home in Baltimore County, Maryland. Twenty-three-year-old Kirk Bloodsworth was accused of the crime, and he was convicted and sentenced to death after a jury trial based...

Americans have argued over the death penalty since the early days of the republic. Today, high-profile cases provide frequent opportunities for debate between proponents and opponents of capital punishment. For example, in 1997, Timothy McVeigh was...

Arguments in favor of the death penalty, including statements that show that statistics used by anti-death penalty groups are inaccurate.

Detailed argument opposing capital punishment

Facts and opinions arguing in support of the death penalty.