Death_Penalty

Death Penalty Capital Punishment: Does Race Matter' The employment of the death penalty as the ultimate criminal sanction has been the subject of enormous debate both in the United States and internationally. Execution has been challenged not only on moral grounds, but on constitutional grounds. Specifically, capital punishment has been argued to violate the Eighth Amendment, which guarantees protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court held in Furman v. Georgia (1972) that the arbitrary nature of the death penalty system was in violation of the Eighth amendment, and ordered states to rework their sentencing procedures. Justice Thurgood Marshall identified racial discrimination based both on the race of the defendant and the race of the victim, as the primary reason he joined the Supreme Court's majority decision in the Furman case. He was one of several justices who found that racial discrimination produced different patterns of sentencing and rates of execution for blacks and whites. ( Rothman, p.1)The Court's subsequent ruling in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) required judges and juries to use "guided discretion" when implementing capital sentences in an effort to combat arbitrariness, consequently reinstating the death penalty. Now, in the post-Furman death penalty era the question remains " does death, capital, racial, penalty, found, punishment, cases, blacks, race, black, white, whites, been, sentencing, discrimmination, court, justice, jury, discrimination, system, study, states, however, defendant, victim, supreme, prosecutors, likely, executed, case, act, studies, similar, sentence, review