Death penalty in the United States

Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the United States, currently used by 31 states and the federal government. Its existence can be traced to the beginning of the American colonies. The United States is the only Western country currently applying the death penalty, one of 57 countries worldwide applying it, and was the first to develop lethal injection as a method of execution, which has since been adopted by five other countries.

There were no executions in the United States between 1967 and 1977. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down capital punishment statutes in Furman v. Georgia, reducing all death sentences pending at the time to life imprisonment.

Subsequently, a majority of states passed new death penalty statutes, and the court affirmed the legality of capital punishment in the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia. Since then, more than 7,800 defendants have been sentenced to death, over 1,400 of them have been executed, more than 2,900 are still on death row, and 158 have been exonerated, but none of these have been executed. The death penalty is in practice applied only for murder involving an aggravating factor such as multiple victims, rape, robbery, or a victim under a certain age.

The first recorded death sentence in the British North American colonies was carried out in 1608 on Captain George Kendall, who was executed by firing squad at the Jamestown colony for allegedly spying for the Spanish government.

The Bill of Rights adopted in 1789 included the Eighth Amendment which prohibited cruel and unusual punishment. The Fifth Amendment was drafted with language implying a possible use of the death penalty, requiring a grand jury indictment for "capital crime" and a due process of law for deprivation of "life" by the government. The Fourteenth Amendment adopted in 1868 also requires a due process of law for deprivation of life by any state.

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