is capital punishment consistent with the eighth amendment?

Answer 1

No cruel or unusual punishments are allowed according to this amendment. The problem is...what exactly is cruel or unusual? At the time of the writing of this amendment guilty people were sometimes pulled into 4 pieces by horses, strangled, burned, branded, disemboweled, or had their hands cut off or sat in stocks so that others could make fun of them and throw things at them. Today these seem cruel and unusual. So today states use the gas chamber, lethal injection, or the electric chair. Do you believe that executing someone found guilty of terrible crimes is cruel or unusual? I personally do.

This amendment also prevents the government from punishing a criminal in some strange or unusual way. If someone is found guilty of stealing, the court can't cut off your hand or make you sing in the nude on television although Simon Cowel might find a loophole for next years season of American Idol.

Capital punishment or execution is still argued about today and probably always will be. Some argue that it helps stop others from committing crimes because they won't want to be executed. Others argue that no matter how terrible the crime, the state does not have the right to kill a human being. Each state decides whether or not to have executions because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the death penalty was constitutional, however immoral I may think it is!

Additional comment for the poster below me:
The electric chair is still in use in many states today.

Answer 2

The only part it could violate is the part about "no cruel or unusual punishment". As capital punishment certainly can not be deemed 'unusual', the question comes down to "Is it cruel?". That is a subject of much debate and one that will never be resolved. Certain methods of capital punishment have been deemed cruel, like hanging and the electric chair, hence they are no longer used, in favor of the gas chamber and lethal injection.

Personally, I would not call capital punishment cruel, as it stands today in the US, but I am against it for other reasons.

Answer 3

Well, I was taught the eighth commandment
as "Thou shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." So, actually the capital punishment question does not directly relate to the eighth commandment.

You might be getting the eighth commandment mixed up with the sixth commandment: "Thou shalt not kill." If so, there is an apparent inconsistency with this commandment and capital punishment, I think.

Answer 4

Is it cruel and unusal punishment? If so, then doctors and hospitals keeping a terminal cancer patient alive with no hope of recovery and living as a prisoner in pain within their own body are guilty of violating that premise. We don't treat our beloved family pets with such cruelty. Is keeping a person in a mental ward the rest of their life when doctors do not know why the person cannot speak cruel and unusual punishment? Is allowing foster parents with eight children kept in a basement and barely fed cruel and unusual punishment? Is injecting a painless but fatal drug into a convicted murderer that lives only to torture and kill again and who may get free someday to come to your house to kill you or someone you love cruel and unusual punishment? Is the pure legality of the the amendment really all that relevant in these instances? Decide for yourself.

Answer 5

I supported capital punishment for a protracted time, however the greater I found out approximately it, the greater I got here to oppose it. interior the top, various components replaced my concepts: - blunders happen. considering 1973 interior the U.S., over one hundred forty human beings have been released from dying row with info of their innocence. those are all people who have been discovered accountable "previous a smart doubt." A existence sentence is reversible. An execution isn't. - fee - because of the legal equipment designed to cut back wrongful executions (and the super fee of retaining dying row centers), it costs taxpayers lots greater to execute somebody than to imprison them for existence. - this is not a deterrent - violent crime expenses are constantly larger in dying penalty jurisdictions. - that's inconsistently and arbitrarily utilized. - It places too lots power interior the arms of the government. - because of the fact the U.S. is between the final last countries with capital punishment, many different international places refuse to extradite primary criminals who must be status trial right here. - It fosters a subculture of violence by ability of declaring that killing is a suitable answer to a difficulty. - Jesus became against it (see Matthew 5:7 & 5:38-39, James 4:12, Romans 12:17-21, John 8:7, and James a million:20). - existence without parole (LWOP) is on the books in maximum states now (all different than Alaska), and it ability what it says. people who get this sentence are taken off the streets. For good. - As Voltaire as quickly as wrote, "enable the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged guy is robust for not something; a guy condemned to public works nonetheless serves the country, and is a residing lesson." - in spite of in case you’re a hardened criminal or a central authority representing the persons, killing an unarmed man or woman is incorrect. era. “He did it first” isn't a valid reason.

Answer 6

Capital punishment is not consistant with anything, with the exception of serial killers!

Answer 7

YES! As the sister of a murdered brother, I know they rarely give the death penalty. My brother stopped to by milk for his 3 children- all under age of 5 - & got shot during store robbery. he did not even know his murderers. They said the crime was not henious enough for death penalty. Tell it to his daughter in college with no memory of her Dad. They take great pains to make it painless for the murderers, I wish the murderers had made it painless for my brother that they shot & left to bled to death. This admentment was to stop public floggings, beheadings, cutting off hans & etc being done around the world.

Answer 8

Yes