In Their Own Words

2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 376-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maranda A. Upton ◽  
Tabitha M. Carwile ◽  
Kristina S. Brown

Last statements have been a common practice as part of capital punishment as far back as the 1300s in Europe. In the United States, the first execution occurred in 1608, and currently, 32 states have the death penalty. In 1991, Missouri integrated death row inmates into the general prison population, which makes this population unique compared with other death row populations across the United States. This article is a qualitative study on the themes found in the last statements of 46 capitally punished inmates in Missouri from 1995 to 2011. The purpose of this study was to determine if capital punishment inmates being housed in the general population had an impact on an inmate’s last statement prior to execution. Three domains emerged from these last statements: life, death, and execution. The most common theme identified was love while the least common theme was acceptance. The themes found in this research were consistent with previous studies which looked at inmates executed in Texas where inmates sentenced to capital punishment are separated from the general prison population. Implications, limitations, and future research areas are discussed.

2007 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 281-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra J. Jones ◽  
Elizabeth Beck

The families of death row inmates experience grief and loss issues that have been neglected by scholars and clinicians alike. The issues found in this population are unique and require our understanding. The present study uses the concepts of disenfranchised grief and nonfinite loss to uncover the pain experienced by the children and other family members who have a loved one on death row. Kenneth Doka's (1989) concept of disenfranchised grief is utilized to bring attention to the ways in which the circumstances surrounding an execution leave the family members of those condemned to death outside of the “grieving rules” that exist in the United States. Family members are disenfranchised from their grief, as society does not socially validate their pain. The loss that they feel is also nonfinite (Bruce & Schultz, 2001) in that it is continuous and denies the families all of the hopes, dreams, and expectations that they had for their loved one who now sits on death row. The qualitative interview method was utilized by the authors of this study to gather data from 26 family members of death row inmates who are incarcerated along the East Coast of the United States. The reactions of this group of family members are varied and complex, yet they include the following common responses: social isolation due to stigma and their own feelings of criminalization, intensified family conflict between family members who grieve differently from one another, diminished self-esteem, shame, diffused and specific feelings of guilt, and a chronic state of despair. This study explores virtually untapped terrain. An examination of the microlevel effects of the death penalty on families provides insight in to the area of death and dying, especially as it is related to disenfranchised loss and nonfinite grief. In addition, this study provides insight into the death penalty and its effects.


1969 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter C. Reckless

Undoubtedly the most important trend in capital punishment has been the dramatic reduction in the number of offenses statutorily punishable by the death penalty. About two hundred years ago England had over two hundred offenses calling for the death penalty; it now has four. Some countries have abolished capital punishment completely; a few retain it for unusual offenses only. The trend throughout the world, even in the great number of countries that retain the death penalty, is definitely toward a de facto, not a de jure, form of abolition. In the United States, where the death penalty is possible in three-fourths of the states, the number of executions has declined from 199 in 1935 to an average of less than three in the last four years. This change is related to public sentiment against the use of the death penalty and even more directly to the unwillingness of juries and courts to impose a first-degree sentence. The increasing willingness of governors to commute a death sentence and of courts to hear appeals also contributes to this decline. A review of the evidence indicates that use of the death penalty has no discernible effect on the commission of capital offenses (especially murder).


1983 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phoebe C. Ellsworth ◽  
Lee Ross

A survey designed to examine the attitudinal and informational bases of people's opinions about the death penalty was administered to 500 Northern California residents (response rate = 96 percent). Of these, 58.8 percent were proponents of capital punishment, 30.8 percent were opponents, and 10.4 percent were undecided. When asked whether they favored mandatory, discretionary, or no death penalty for various crimes, respondents tended to treat these options as points on a scale of strength of belief, with mandatory penalties favored for the most serious crimes, rather than considering the questions of objectivity and fairness that have influenced the United States Supreme Court's considerations of these options. For no crime did a majority favor execution of all those convicted, even when a mandatory penalty was endorsed. Respondents were generally ignorant on factual issues related to the death penalty, and indicated that if their factual beliefs (in deterrence) were incorrect, their attitude would not be influenced. When asked about their reasons for favoring or opposing the death penalty, respondents tended to endorse all reasons consistent with their attitudes, indicating that the attitude does not stem from a set of reasoned beliefs, but may be an undifferenti ated, emotional reflection of one's ideological self-image. Opponents favored due process guarantees more than did Proponents. A majority of respondents said they would need more evidence to convict if a case was capital. Theoretical and legal implications of the results are discussed.


2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 925-928
Author(s):  
Marie Gottschalk

The death penalty is declining in the United States. The number of people executed each year has fallen by about half since the late 1990s. Opinion polls show support for capital punishment is waning. It now stands at about two-thirds, down from a high point of 86% in 1995, according to Gallup polls (p. 173).


Author(s):  
Paul Kaplan

The death penalty, also referred to as capital punishment, is the process whereby a state government orders a sentence of death for a person found guilty of a particular set of criminal offenses. In the United States, the primary capital crime is first-degree murder with an additional aggravating factor, usually called a “special circumstance” (e.g., murder of a law enforcement officer). Capital punishment is a complex process that includes a criminal charge, an involved legal process, sentencing, special “death row” prison housing, post-conviction appeals, and the ultimate execution of the defendant. Persons sentenced to death are called condemned. Execution refers specifically to the process in which the defendant is killed. Capital punishment has been practiced throughout human history, with considerable variation across eras and regions. In the last 50 years, the use of capital punishment has declined across the globe, and there are relatively few countries that use it regularly as a form of punishment, most notably China. Some countries have abolished the death penalty completely, such as all member states of the European Union. Most other countries have seen a decline in its use. For instance, only 31 out of 50 states in the United States currently have death penalty statutes (there are also federal death penalty statutes, which are rarely used). The other 19 U.S. states are referred to as “abolitionist.” The “modern era” of capital punishment in the United States was spurred by two important Supreme Court cases. The Furman v. Georgia (1972) decision ruled that arbitrariness in the application of the death penalty deemed its use unconstitutional. The reversal of that ruling four years later in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) reestablished the death penalty in America, and experts refer to the modern era as 1976 to the present.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 299-315
Author(s):  
Carol S. Steiker ◽  
Jordan M. Steiker

This review addresses four key issues in the modern (post-1976) era of capital punishment in the United States. First, why has the United States retained the death penalty when all its peer countries (all other developed Western democracies) have abolished it? Second, how should we understand the role of race in shaping the distinctive path of capital punishment in the United States, given our country's history of race-based slavery and slavery's intractable legacy of discrimination? Third, what is the significance of the sudden and profound withering of the practice of capital punishment in the past two decades? And, finally, what would abolition of the death penalty in the United States (should it ever occur) mean for the larger criminal justice system?


2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 929-976
Author(s):  
Daniel LaChance

From the 1830s to the 1930s, elites across the United States increasingly privatized executions and standardized execution protocols. These changes reflected and reinforced a more bureaucratic image of the state as an abstract entity run by professionals operating in rule-bound roles rather than particular actors governing in an unsystematic way. After this period of change, the aesthetics of the execution ceremony had so thoroughly changed that the death penalty had the potential to inspire critiques of the modern state as cold, detached, and callous. It rarely did, however. Changes to state killing threatened to diminish the recognition of human dignity in the nation's execution chambers were countered by melodramatic popular renderings of executions that preserved their sacred, traditional character. Toward the end of this period of change, from 1915 to 1940, playwrights, screenwriters, and journalists maintained executions as events in which the humanity of the state that killed and the condemned who died was constantly foregrounded, even as execution modes and protocols became rationalized and machine-like. Reflecting this ethos, images of condemned men in the nation's collective imagination became disproportionately white.


2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (04) ◽  
pp. 1033-1061 ◽  
Author(s):  
David T. Johnson

It is often said that American capital punishment fulfills no purposes, serves no functions, and possesses no coherent rationale. In Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010), David Garland argues that American capital punishment is functional, meaningful, and effective, especially in the cultural realm of death penalty discourse. He also demonstrates that America's radically local version of democracy helps explain why the death penalty has persisted in the United States long after it disappeared in other Western democracies and that many of the peculiar forms through which American capital punishment is now administered have been designed to deny association with the lynchings that have occurred in American history. Garland arrives at these conclusions by comparing capital punishment in contemporary America with death penalty systems from the American past and from other Western nations. This essay argues that comparison with Asia further illuminates what is peculiar—and ordinary—in American capital punishment.


2004 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Schultz Newman ◽  
Eric Rayz ◽  
Scott Eric Friedman

The birthplace of the American republic—the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—has historically been at the forefront of the capital punishment legislation in the United States. It was the first colony in the Union to abolish the death penalty for all crimes with the exception of murder. It was the first to set forth a statutory distinction between different degrees of criminal homicide, confining imposition of capital punishment to the most chilling form of this crime—“willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing.” With this storied history in mind, we have undertaken the task of examining the current state of the death penalty in the Commonwealth. Hence, in Part II of this Article, we set forth a detailed history of the capital sentencing scheme in Pennsylvania. Part III undertakes a statistical study of the imposition of the death penalty in the Commonwealth from 1978 until 1997. In Part IV, we conclude by summing up our general observations.


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