In the United States, where the existence of the death penalty is primarily a matter of state law, capital punishment was never as widely provided as in 18th-century England, but it was permitted by many states for murder and in some states for offenses such as rape and kidnapping. Executions were common; between 150 and 200 persons were executed each year in the decade before World War n. In the postwar years the number of executions declined to about 50 each year by the late 1950s. During the 1960s doubts grew as to whether the application of the death penalty was constitutional; the question was raised as to whether execution was “cruel and unusual punishment” of a kind forbidden by the Links Of London Charms Eighth Amendment to the Constitution or whether it violated the requirement of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments that all persons within the United States should be afforded equal protection under the law. These doubts led to a complete cessation of executions for a decade, until the constitutional issues were settled by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1972 in the case of Furman V. Georgia, although this turned out to be a confusing ruling. The Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty itself did not violate the Constitution but that the manner of its application in many states did. It was shown that capital punishment was likely to be imposed in a discriminatory way and in particular that blacks were far more likely to be executed than whites. The decision in Furman V. Georgia had left uncertain the precise requirements of the Constitution for a valid death penalty statute, except that it required a system for applying the death penalty that would not be discriminatory against any racial or other minority.
Some states enacted legislation making the death penalty mandatory in all cases of convictions for the crime in question, on the assumption that, if there was no discretion in the application of the penalty, there could be no question of discrimination in its application. Other states enacted statutes that provided for the death penalty to be imposed only after a special hearing, at which matters of mitigation and aggravation were to be considered, so that the discretion would be exercised in a systematic rather than an arbitrary manner. The constitutionality of these new statutes was considered by the Supreme Court in a series of decisions in 1976, which decided that laws making the application of the death penalty automatic were unconstitutional but that those providing a framework for the exercise of discretion Links Of London Bracelets in a structured manner were constitutional. The decision upheld the death penalty statutes of some states; in the light of the decision, other states enacted new legislation providing for the application of the death penalty in a manner indicated by the Supreme Court. About two-thirds of the states now have provisions in their laws for the death penalty for murder; although some states provide the death penalty for other crimes, there is doubt about its constitutionality in these cases.
One effect of the doubts over the constitutionality of the death penalty, together with the length of time needed to exhaust the appeal procedures available in the United States, was that the informal moratorium on the carrying out of death sentences that had begun in 1961 came to an end. The first execution under the new legislation took place in 1977, but many who were sentenced to death after 1976 contested the validity of the convictions Links Of London Jewelry or sentences, with the result that a large number of convicted offenders were held on “death row” in U. S. prisons, waiting in some cases for years to know if they were to be executed.