In the United States Constitution, the 8th Amendment prohibits the use and practices of cruel and unusual punishment. What exactly is considered to be cruel and unusual punishment? This question is a hot topic among America's many different current controversies. Many people are saying that the use of capital punishment (to be sentenced to death as a penalty in the eyes of the law [a capital crime]. An execution [capital punishment]) is a direct violation of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (Capital Punishment). They say there should be another way to deal with these criminals other than having them executed. The purpose of this paper is to give a brief history of the death penalty and state some alternative forms of punishment along with opposing viewpoints. As t which one is right, that's up to you to decide. Capital punishment has been a part of our government since the seventeenth century (The Death Penalty in America). The criminal law that we had here was just a variation colony by colony, on the law of England. Although the capital law of the thirteen colonies differed from one another, many interesting and important details concerning the death penalty and various other things occurred during the century and a half of the colonial period. All of the colonies authorized public executions by hanging as the mandatory punishment for various crimes against the state, the person, and the property (The Death Penalty in America). In the early nineteenth century, English criminal law imposed the death penalty for a wide range of crimes from murder, treason, rape, to such stupid things as petty theft. Of all of the nonhomocidal crimes particularly by death, rape was by far the most numerous. Some ten percent of all executions carried out between 1930 and 1977 were for rape. Those who opted to keep the death penalty did so because they thought that it would act as a discouragement for would be crim...
