Barbaric Capital Punishment Over the past three decades the issue of capital punishment has been highly controversial in the United States. In 1972 the United States Supreme Court decided Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty was unconstitutional because it was a form of "cruel and unusual punishment." This decision, however, did not last long; in July 1975 the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment did not violate any part of the Constitution. Executions resumed as before 1972. Since then, 180 prisoners have been executed. The United States Supreme Court should abolish the death penalty because it is a form of "cruel and unusual punishment." Under the current U.S. Constitution, which has been in place for over 200 years, government prisoners cannot be subjected to any type of punishment that is considered cruel and unusual. However, it is questionable whether all forms of capital punishment used by the government are legal or not under the Constitution. Forms of capital punishment still used in the United States include hanging, firing squad, electrocution, gas chamber, and lethal injection. With hangings, a rope is attached to a person's neck and they proceed to fall from a certain height with the other end of the rope attached to something higher than them. The result is strangulation, which may take some time, or complete decapitation. With the firing squad option the prisoner is tied to a chair and blinded. Subsequently, a firing squad composed mostly of five individuals fires pistol shots at a target attached to the prisoner's chest (ACLU). The most used form of execution was electrocution. With this method of electing... middle of paper... you get your goal. Because the death penalty does not achieve its main objective and for the reasons stated above it should be abolished. Works Cited American Civil Liberties Union. "Information document number 8." gopher://gopher.pipeline.com:70/00/society/aclu/publications/papers/8.Associated Press. "PD leaders: the death penalty fails". news: penalty of [email protected]:Thu 23 Feb 95 4:40:09 PST.Bedau, Hugo Adam. “The Case Against the Death Penalty.”gopher://gopher.pipeline.com:70/00/society/aclu/issues/death/case_against.Blumstein, Alfred, and Jacqueline Cohen. Deterrence and incapacitation: Estimating the effects of criminal sanctions on crime rates. National Academy of Sciences: Washington, DC, 1978.Van den Haag, Ernest. Punishing criminals: a very old and painful issue. Basic Books, Inc.: New York, 1975.