Is capital punishment Constitutional?  The short answer is that, yes it is.  The Supreme Court has ruled that intravenous execution is neither cruel nor unusual punishment.  The Court ruled on this many times and has always found that the act of executing a person was neither cruel nor unusual, though in the past some of the methods used for sentencing were unconstitutional. Many people argue that there is an evolving understanding of what is cruel and unusual, but at the same time people have been finding more and more humane ways to kill people.  The most common method right now is to pump them full of poisons.  The current drug has three parts.  The first part is a powerful anesthetic. After that drug goes into the person they can usually be considered dead, but just to be extra safe there is another drug pumped into the person that stops their heart and one to stop his lungs.  There have been botches when the drugs are old and the executed person starts to rasp or witnesses here sounds come out of the executed person, but the biggest problem is that sometimes the veins in a person’s arms have been damaged by other needles going into them.  Then they have to find other veins.  My mother’s client, the one she wasn’t sure had actually murdered the person he was executed for killing, had to have the injection through his feet.  This method has been found to be neither cruel nor unusual.  It is thus Constitutional.

The Supreme Court has ruled that it is cruel or unusual to execute certain people.  The mentally retarded can’t be executed. The Supreme Court determined that they could not be on account of the question of whether or not they can really understand what is happening to them.  The reasoning was that if they could not understand that they were being executed for their crimes then it was cruel to execute them.  A similar reasoning has been provided for minors , though they can be charged as adults most of the time for other crimes.  The idea of sentencing children to death is generally frowned upon as well.  Personally I find it strange that the mentally ill are able to be executed.  There is a very high bar for an insanity plea in a court room.  You would almost think that a person  who was mentally ill would fall into the category of unable to understand what is happening to them, but they haven’t been given that classification surprisingly.  The Supreme Court has also ruled that only certain kinds of crimes can be punished with execution.  A rape for example is not extreme enough to warrant a death sentence, but if the woman is then murdered it can warrant a death penalty.

As you know I usually try to find an argument against whatever I have said above. The only real argument I can come up with is that just because something is Constitutional does not mean that it is a good law.  Many people would argue that Obama-care is a law such as this.   I think that capital punishment was such as this.  We can execute people for murder, but that doesn’t make it a good thing or a large benefit to society.  That is how I feel on the issue of the Constitutionality of the death penalty.

This is my last post so i’m going to do some light iteration. I don’t like the death penalty.  I think that there is too much error for mistakes which can lead to more innocent people dying.  I know the cost of the death penalty is extremely large compared to the punishment of life without parole, and I don’t see a large enough difference between the results  of the two punishments to justify the costs.  I don’t know if capital punishment deters crime.  I know the death penalty is Constitutional, but I don’t think that means anything as to whether or not it should be in place.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/part-i-history-death-penalty

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/death_penalty

http://www.balancedpolitics.org/death_penalty.htm