The United States is one of the last western nations to still have the death penalty. The issue remains a contentious one: 34 states currently use capital punishment as part of their judicial systems.
The debate over the death penalty and its role in American history is nothing new -- it dates back to the beginning of our nation in the 17th century.
According to the Web site DeathPenaltyInfo.org, early settlers brought the death penalty with them from Europe. The first recorded execution was Capt. George Kendall, who was convicted of being a spy for Spain in 1608.
Capital punishment continued into the mid-19th Century when an abolitionist movement began. Some states reduced the number of executions, while others banned it outright.
The early 20th Century also saw a major push to end capital punishment. Six states banned it, while another three states limited it to rarely committed crimes.
However, in the 1920s-1940s the death penalty saw a resurgence. The thinking among criminologists at the time was that it was necessary to maintain social order as the country suffered through the Depression and Prohibition. As a result, the 1930s saw more executions than any other decade in U.S. history -- an average of 167 per year.
The appetite for the death penalty sank in the 1950s and 60s. Many allied nations abolished it, and in the U.S. there were 715 executions, compared to 1289 in the previous decade. Just 191 convicts were put to death from 1960 to 1967.
The 1960s also brought the first legal challenges to the death penalty. This culminated with a Supreme Court decision in 1967 that suspended capital punishment across the land. The court ruled that constitutional problems with the death penalty had to be resolved before executions could continue.
In the 1972 landmark Furman v. Georgia decision, the Court set the standard for "cruel and unusual punishment," and said existing death penalty statutes were no longer valid. It allowed states to rewrite their statutes, which they promptly did.
In the 1976 ruling known as the Gregg decision, the court approved the new statutes and the death penalty was reinstated. Executions resumed the following year when Gary Gilmore faced a firing squad in Utah.
Since then, especially with recent developments in DNA testing and false convictions, legislatures have been debating the death penalty in their individual states. Most states have moved away from certain "cruel" methods over the years and adopted lethal injection as the preferred way to put convicts to death.
Why, if the rest of the world has abolished it, does the United States still practice capital punishment? We are supposed to be one of the worlds leaders in human rights, yet it seems terribly evident that the rest of the world frowns on our use of the death penalty as a cruel and unusual punishment.