Capital Punishment

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Excerpt from Capital Punishment: Hearings Before Subcommittee No. 3 of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-Second Congress, Second SessionA sampling of the opinions of constitutional scholars throughout the nation indicates that the enactment of a two-year suspension of the death penalty is well within the constitutional powers of the Congress. Moreover, I believe that enactment of a national moratorium will go far to promote a thoughtful and thorough reexamination of the constitutional and policy issues involved.Some suggest that a death penalty suspension act such as the one I have introduced is not actually required. They say that State executives and the courts can be relied on to stay executions during any period of study and un certainty. They may be right but the matter ought not to be left to chance. Even if the Congress or the States determine to abolish capital punishment, there can be no reparation for those who are executed in the meantime. These dead men will have suffered irreparable injury in the most telling sense. What is more, it has been persuasively urged that a system that leaves the matter of stays of execution to a case-to-case approach is too risky and un predictable. Men may die for reasons having nothing to do with the merits of their constitutional claims.I would like brie¿y to touch upon the constitutional bases upon which Con gress would enact a nationwide stay. There is evidence that the death penalty falls in a discriminatory pattern on minorities and poor people, in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. For example, ac cording to statistics gathered by the Washington Research Project, of 455 men executed for rape Since 1930, 405 or nearly 90 percent, have been black. Blacks constitute 76 percent of those executed for robbery, 83 percent of those executed for assault by a life prisoner, and 100 percent of those executed for burglary in the same period. Of those executed for murder since 1930, 49 percent have been black, although blacks have made up only about 10 percent of the population in that period. The rate of execution of blacks far exceeds the proportion of capital crimes committed by black defendants.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.