Capital punishment is the legal infliction of the death penalty on persons convicted of a crime.(Cox 12) It is not intended to inflict any physical pain or any torture; however, it is a severe form of corporal punishment. It is unchangeable because it removes those punished from society permanently instead of the alternative of life-long imprisonment. The death penalty has been imposed throughout history for many crimes, ranging from blasphemy and treason to petty theft and murder. Although the death penalty was widely accepted throughout the early United States, not everyone approved of it.
             In the late-eighteen century, resistance to the death penalty gathered enough strength to lead to import restrictions on the use of the death penalty in several northern states, while Michigan, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island abandoned the practice altogether. (Kronenwetter 15) In 1794, Pennsylvania adopted a law to distinguish the degrees of murder and only used the death penalty for premeditated first-degree murder. In 1846, Louisiana abolished the mandatory death penalty and authorized the option of sentencing a capital offender to life imprisonment rather than to death. Amendments were made to reflect the changes in society's views on the morality of capital punishment. That resulted in the narrowing down of the list of one hundred crimes to twelve, punishable by the death penalty in 1833. In 1869 it was cut down yet again to just three: treason, rape, and murder because of the violent nature of these crimes. In the 1970s, a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions made the death penalty in the U.S. unconstitutional in the instances if it is mandatory, if it is imposed without providing courts with adequate guidance to make the right decision in the severity of the sentence, or if it is imposed for a crime that does not take or threaten the life of another human being. The death penalty was also confined to crimes of murder, including felony ...