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...

ON APRIL 19, 1995, JUST a few minutes after 9 A.M. , the lives of 168 men, women, and children were brutally snuffed out through the actions of one man named Timothy McVeigh. More than 800 others were injured and scarred for life, both physically and...

Throughout the twentieth century, America remained one of the few industrialized countries which carried out executions of criminals. Most trace this attitude to the Biblical roots of the country and the dictum of "eye for an eye"...

execution of an offender sentenced to death after conviction by a court of law of a criminal offense. Capital punishment should be distinguished from extrajudicial executions carried out without due process of law. The term death penalty is sometimes...

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...

Execution of an offender sentenced to death after conviction by a court of law of a criminal offense. Capital punishment for murder, treason, arson, and rape was widely employed in ancient Greece, and the Romans also used it for a wide range of...

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...

See *CAPITAL...

See *CAPITAL...

Capital punishment debate Religion and capital punishment Wrongful...