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American Capital Punishment Over Changing Times: Policies and Practices

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Handbook on Crime and Deviance

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Abstract

This chapter provides a brief history of capital punishment in the United States, including legislative developments and the Supreme Court’s major constitutional rulings through the present. It discusses the principal objectives offered in support of the death penalty, identifies several important issues concerning the administration of capital punishment laws, and concludes by describing emergent trends in the death penalty’s usage nationwide.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Within the category of “innocent” persons under sentence of death are those whose capital convictions were overturned and who later were acquitted at a retrial, or had all charges against them dropped, or who were pardoned based on new evidence of their innocence (Death Penalty Information Center, 2004 ).

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  1. School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, USA

    James R. Acker

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  1. Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Marvin D. Krohn

  2. Department of Criminal Justice, Radford University, Radford, VA, USA

    Nicole Hendrix

  3. School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

    Gina Penly Hall

  4. School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

    Alan J. Lizotte

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Acker, J.R. (2019). American Capital Punishment Over Changing Times: Policies and Practices. In: Krohn, M., Hendrix, N., Penly Hall, G., Lizotte, A. (eds) Handbook on Crime and Deviance. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20779-3_20

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