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The death penalty is also called capital punishment. In this case the word “capital” means the person’s head, in the past people were executed by taking off their head from their body. The history of capital punishment is rather long, one of the first laws concerning it was met in the eighteenth century B.C. in the Code of King of Hammaurabi of Babylon. Nowadays such things as marrying a Jew or not confessing to a crime would probably not considered being worth a person’s life, but there were times when these were considered to be rather hard offenses and were punished this way. The Twentieth Century is known for the “Progressive Period” of the reforms in the USA. The atmosphere was rather intense as people in the USA were afraid of the influence of the Russian Revolution. Later the USA took part in the World War 1 and the result were the social conflicts between socialists and capitalists. As a result, “five of the six abolitionist states reinstated their death penalty by 1920” (3).
There are several main methods of death penalty, which were invented within the whole history of this practice, among them:
- Hanging: this method is considered humane as the neck is broken usually very quickly, but if the distance is too great, the rope will tear his head off.
- Electric chair: it is hard to say what experiences a person being executed this way. The two cases are known, where prisoners lived for 4 to 10 minutes before finally being dead.
- Firing squad: Death comes quickly, if the killers don’t miss. In the U.S., this method was used only Utah. Later it was changed for lethal injection as a more humane method.
- Poison gas: Cyanide is dropped into acid and then they get the Hydrogen Cyanide, a gas, which actually kills a human being. A person experiences several minutes of agony and then dies.
- Lethal injection: the prisoner is strapped to the table in a special room and lethal drugs are injected into him. If properly conducted, the prisoner quickly becomes unconscious. This method is becoming more and more popular.
- Guillotine: A famous French invention was never used in North America. After the neck is severed a person dies very quickly.
- Stoning: “The prisoner is often buried up to his neck and pelted with rocks until they eventually die. Not used in North America, but used in some Muslim countries as a penalty for murder, adultery and other crimes”
“The use of death penalty in America was under the influence of Britain. The Europeans coming to the new world were bringing the practice of capital punishment with them. The reason for executing Kendall, in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608 was the suspect that he was a spy for Spain” (2).
The problem of death penalty is certainly vital not only for government or juridical system, this an important social issue, and there are certainly a lot of presentations of it from different sides and points of view of all people. It is h本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。