In past years, society has looked nearly exclusively at notorious cases. For instance, the case of Stanford vs. Kentucky, wherein a seventeen-year old boy had committed the crime of murder in Kentucky. The court affirmed the death sentence and rejected Stanford's belief that he had a constitutional right to be tried in the juvenile justice system due to his age. Although an extremely complicated issue, the reasons to support capital punishment outweigh the negative aspects of responding to specific criminal acts. This paper will outline the death penalty and the many arguments for and against its use, along with the few methods of carrying out this sentence.
             The death penalty has been used in some way or another for many centuries. The first known execution in the colonies of the soon to be United States was of Daniel Frank, put to death for theft in the colony of Virginia. Beginning in the 1930's, death penalty statistics started to be recorded on a regular basis. From 1930 to 1967, 3,859 persons were executed under civil jurisdiction in the United States. Three out of five of those executions took place in the Southern U.S., with the State of Georgia having the highest number of executions during that period.
             Although some U.S. states began abolishing the death penalty, most states held onto capital punishment. Some states made more crimes capital offenses, especially for offenses committed by slaves. Near the end of the 1960's, a moratorium on executions had been placed on the United States, with the last execution taking place in 1967. Between 1967 and 1972, new laws were enacted due to one death penalty case. The Supreme Court decision in Furmann v. Georgia, came down on federal and state laws concerning the application of the death penalty as a punishment for many crimes. The Supreme Court stated that the death penalty was a 'cruel and unusual punishment' in many crimes. More than 600...