fendants because they did not believe they deserved to die, and that mandatory laws did not allow juries to take mitigating circumstances into account. Because of this decision over 170 prisoners in North Carolina and Louisiana had sentences commuted to life imprisonment. In 1977 the Supreme Court again limited the scope of execution of criminals. In Coker v. Georgia it declared that defendants found guilty of rape could not be put to death. This decision made it clear that the court would find the death penalty unconstitutional for every crime that did not involve the deliberate taking of human life. Although the Supreme Court has been petitioned by thousands of litigants, and heard hundreds of arguments on every possible issue, none of the cases are as significant as the two previously mentioned, Furman v. Georgia and Gregg v. Georgia four years later.Statistical DataSince 1977 when the death penalty was reintroduced to jurisprudence in the United States, 598 criminals have been executed under the states jurisdiction. Seven states have put to death less than ten criminals since 1977, and twenty-one states with execution statutes have never implemented it. By 1999, 38 states had capital punishments statutes in place, with varying methods in each state. There are only three routinely used forms of execution: gas, electrocution and lethal injection, although execution by hanging and firing squad are still legal. All of the six states that still allow these last two forms of execution, offer at least one alternative method. In Oklahoma, for example, the primary method is lethal injection, but state laws hold that if that form is ever held unconstitutional, lethal gas would be the standard, and if that is found unconstitutional as well, a firing squad could be used. Of the 98 executions that took place in 1999, 94 were carried out by lethal injection, three by electrocution and one by lethal gas. Although 38 states have capital punish...
