On April 19, 1995, a cold-blooded killer drove up to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and left his rented Ryder truck parked outside. But this was not just
another rental truck; it was loaded with 4,800-pounds of a fertilizer and fuel oil bomb. This
bomb was to eventually detonate and kill 168 people and injure more than 500. In the weeks and
months that followed, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the assistance of nearly
all the federal enforcement officers in the country began putting the clues together and searched for the
cold-blooded killers. As a result, on August 11, 1995, Attorney General announced the arrest of a
twenty-seven year old former United States Army member with an outstanding service record;
Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was eventually found guilty of the offenses and was sentenced execution.
With the trial and sentence of McVeigh, to be executed at the hands of the state, the issue of Capital
Punishment has once again come to the forefront of American justice.
Black's Law Dictionary defines Capital Punishment as follows: -
"The Supreme penalty exacted as punishment for murder and other capital crimes."
According to William H. Baker, the first account of Capital punishment can be found in the estimated
year 5000 BC, when God made his covenant with Noah. There is no clear evidence that capital
punishment did or did not exist before Noah. However, according to Elinor Lander Horwitz, it is easy
to speculate that some form of vengeance existed before the Noahic Covenant. Other than the Bible,
the earliest written history of death penalty can be found in the great code of laws drawn up by the
Babylonian Hammurabi in about 2000 BC. As for America, with relatively young history, there have
been men and women put to death for close to one hundred different crimes. These crimes range from
murder, rape, robbery and arson, to treason a...