|
Brian Mengel,
Civil Servant
|
During 1996 there were no successful challenges to the constitutionality of State death penalty laws, and no State enacted any new legislation authorizing capital punishment.
|
|
Ben Werner,
Student Newspaper Editor
|
Meanwhile Thursday, death penalty opponents seized on the 2nd anniversary of Ryan's moratorium on capital punishment to announce a campaign to abolish the death penalty in Illinois.
Amnesty International also advocates for the worldwide abolition of capital punishment and monitors legislation connected to the death penalty issue.
Since the reinstatement of the federal death penalty, seventy-six (76) percent of the defendants approved for capital punishment are members of minority groups.
|
|
John Carthy,
Gun Shop Sales Assistant
|
This is because United States Supreme Court rulings upholding the death penalty for 16-year-olds would take precedence over a 1998 ruling by the Florida Supreme Court that declared capital punishment unconstitutional for people under 17.
|
|
Mark Harris,
Priest
|
One of the greatest ironies in death penalty debates is that these conversations presume that the capital punishment will be applied to those who have been sentenced thusly.
|
|
Thomas Owens,
Police Officer
|
If the facts of a case legally support a request for the death penalty, the county or district attorney is required to notify the defendant that the prosecutor intends to seek capital punishment.
Tennessee's capital punishment statute was also revised to specify that whenever the death penalty is imposed for first degree murder, the defendant has the right of direct appeal to the court of criminal appeals.
If the death penalty were a deterrent, then would it not make sense to you that the numbers of inmates confined to death row would decrease after twenty five years, rather than increase so dramatically since the reinstatement of capital punishment?
|
|
Bob Greenberg,
Congressional Candidate
|
Supreme Court issued two landmark death penalty decisions restricting capital punishment and spurring state legislators to enact reforms to death penalty laws.
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has called for an immediate moratorium on capital punishment in the United States, concluding that the death penalty is marked by a "significant degree of unfairness and arbitrariness.
Why are the news media making such an outrageous spectacle of themselves by vigorously campaigning against the death penalty when the vast majority of Americans have supported capital punishment for so long?
|
|
|
