First Supreme Court Case: Eddings V. Oklahoma

Who can be executed? Under the Eighth Amendment, the punishment must be related to the crime, so the execution is appropriate for all murder cases. The new death penalty laws require judges and juries to consider aggravating and mitigating factors in each capita case and to apply the death to all heinous crimes. The Eighth Amendment finds justice should be served in all heinous crimes and those may be sentenced to death. The controversial debate on the Eighth Amendment has been going on years but recently the debate over age, race, mental retardation, and mental ill on whether who should receive the death penalty. Most states do not believe in executing a child, they believe a teenage committing a heinous crime still has time to grow and mature. The first Supreme Court case, Eddings v. Oklahoma (1982) dismissed the death sentence on this sixteen-year-old boy because the child is inexperience, less educated and has no appreciations of the consequences that may happen to him. Most children have anger issues and act out but have no real thought of what they are actually doing is unlawful by killing person. There have been controversies over the years as to whether the criminal justice system is biased towards certain races when it comes to the death penalty. The percentage of Blacks being executed is far more exceeding than there general population. “Jurors in Washington state are three times more likely to recommend a death sentence for a black defendant than for a white defendant (Prof. Beckett, Univ. of Washington, 2014). Blacks may think it is race issues towards them receiving the death penalty in the past but over seventy-five percent of the murder victim cases were white (End-Year repot, 2014). It may seem that black defendants get offered the death sentence more than other races but that does not prove the facts of the criminal justice having a biased side. There should be no controversies over race with capital punishment; no matter the race a person still committed a heinous crime and our justice system puts an end to those committing heinous crimes. Although it sounds wrong for the criminal justice to sentence those who are mentally retarded it does not give them the right to kill and get away with it just because of their situation. There is never justification when committing a heinous crime and you are in fact capable of knowing what you were doing was wrong. The justice system believed that it is not cruel and unusual punishment to impose the death penalty on a mentally retarded individual who …show more content…
There is no longer long lists of how you can put a person to death but the government still has the pleasure of sentencing a person to death for the heinous crime that he or she committed. In this century there will always be pro and cons about capital punishment. The Supreme Court has found that none of the inherently cruel and unusual punishment under Eighth Amendment. The death penalty itself is not cruel and unusual punishment, but a capital case requires two proceedings: to determine guilt and to determine the sentencing guidelines given. No matter what murder receives the death penalty one will pull that they are receiving cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth