This article traces the legislative history of statues prescribing the death penalty for sodomy in 17th-century New England and in the other American colonies. New England and some middle colonies broke with English legal tradition by adopting explicitly biblical language. After the Revolution, Pennsylvania took the lead, in 1786, in dropping the death penalty.

We collected data on the appeals process for all death sentences in U.S. states between 1973 and 1995. The reversal rate was high, with an estimated chance of at least two-thirds that any death sentence would be overturned by a state or federal appeals court. Multilevel regression models fit to the data by state and year indicate that high reversal rates are strongly associated with higher deat...

The American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL) has been formally debating taking an official position on the death penalty since at least 1998. It is clear that there are divergent views on the appropriateness of capital punishment, the involvement of psychiatrists in various stages of death penalty proceedings, the propriety of AAPL’s taking a stand on this (or any) sociopolitical issue...

When anticipating the imposition of the death penalty, jurors may be less inclined to convict defendants. On the other hand, minority defendants have been shown to be treated more punitively, particularly in capital cases. Given that the influence of anticipated sentence severity on verdicts may vary as a function of defendant race, the goal of this study was to test the independent and interac...

In Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court was once again asked to determine if the execution of a juvenile, aged 16 or 17 years at the time of the offense, represents cruel and unusual punishment. In a five-to-four decision, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the Supreme Court of Missouri to overturn the death penalty of Christopher Simmons and held that the execution of juvenile...

S countries abolish the death penalty during their transition from war to peace or from an authoritarian to a democratic regime. In other cases, countries regard the death penalty as a necessary policy to promote their transition. In whatever way, it seems that the transition process has some impact on death penalty policy. How and to what extent is this so, and what exactly are the elements th...

The present study tested the proposition that disengagement of moral self-sanctions enables prison personnel to carry out the death penalty. Three subgroups of personnel in penitentiaries located in three Southern states were assessed in terms of eight mechanisms of moral disengagement. The personnel included the execution teams that carry out the executions; the support teams that provide sola...

Ethical, philosophical and religious values are central to the continuing controversy over capital punishment. Nevertheless, factual evidence can and should inform policy making. The evidence for capital punishment as an uniquely effective deterrent to murder is especially important, since deterrence is the only major pragmatic argument on the pro-death penalty side.1 The purpose of this paper ...

Historically, the church has affirmed the right of the civil magistrate in matters of capital justice. Contemporary culture, in contrast, is permeated with arguments against capital punishment. Even among those professing Christian faith, there is widespread opposition to the death penalty. As a trend, the ever-increasing role of the media in manipulating public sentiment in the face of pressin...