nusual punishment be inflicted." Those who oppose the death penalty target the ‘cruel and unusual' phrase as an explanation of why it is unconstitutional. Since the Framers of the Constitution are no longer with us and we base our nation on the words in which that document contains, the legality of the death penalty is subject to interpretation. Since there is some ambiguity or lack of preciseness in the Constitution, heated debate surrounding this issue has risen in the last ten years. Since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that capital punishment was constitutional, 490 people have been executed- more than three- quarters of them since 1990.Those who argue against capital punishment usually use the wrongly accused as examples. Talk of the issue often centers on a study published in 1987 by Hugo Adam Bedau, a philosophy professor at Tufts University, and Michael L. Radelet, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Florida. Bedau and Radelet named 350 persons they said probably had been wrongly convicted of potentially capital crimes in the United States between 1900 and 1987. Most were later pardoned or had their convictions overturned because of new evidence. The authors say that twenty three people were executed in error.For example, here in Tampa, a black man, Shabaka Waglini, was convicted in 1973 of killing a shopkeeper, he came within 15 hours of dying in the electric chair 10 years later. In 1987, a federal court held that the state prosecutor had knowingly allowed the main witness against Waglini to lie and had concealed evidence showing that Waglini's gun had not fired the fatal ,lbullet. Waglini was later freed. A very important issue is whether or not the death penalty affects the people of the U.S. Those who argue against capital punishment believe that the punishment given to criminals is intended to provide for some type of rehabilitation. If the criminal is killed than the purpose of a penalty is def...
