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The first established death penalty laws date as far back as the Eighteenth Century B.C. in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for 25 different crimes.
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During colonial times, cruel and painful methods like burning or crushing people to death were sometimes used. However, since 1776, all but a few executions have been carried out in one of five ways: hanging, firing squad, the electric chair, the gas chamber, or lethal injection.
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The first recorded execution in the new colonies was that of Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608. Kendall was executed for being a spy for Spain.
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This execution method, conceived in 1881 by a Buffalo, New York dentist named Alfred P. Southwick, was developed throughout the 1880s as a supposed humane alternative to hanging, and first used in 1890. This execution method has been used in the United States and, for several decades, in the Philippines.
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She was executed on March 20, 1899, at Sing Sing Correctional Facility for the murder of her stepdaughter Ida Place.
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The gas chamber was first adopted in the U.S. state of Nevada in 1921 in an effort to provide a more humane form of capital punishment. On February 8, 1924, Gee Jon became the first person to be executed by lethal gas.
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In 1944, George Stinney Jr. was found guilty for allegedly forcing himself on and then taking the lives of two pre-teen girls. The only "evidence" against Stinney was that he'd spoken with the two girls at some point before their passing. An all-white jury deliberated for 10 minutes, after a trial that took just a day. At 14, Stinney was the youngest person executed in the US in the 20th century - with less than three months passing between the incident and his execution.
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1,543 people
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Lethal injection—now the most widely used method of execution in the United States—was first adopted by the U.S. state of Oklahoma in 1977, because it was considered cheaper and more humane than either electrocution or lethal gas.
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Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), prohibiting the execution of persons who were mentally retarded at the time of the of the offense.
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As of 2020, the death penalty is legal in 25 states. A total of 22 states – plus Washington D.C. – have abolished the death penalty, and three states have a governor-imposed moratorium.
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The January 1, 2022 report includes the following statistics: The number of prisoners on death rows or facing capital retrials or resentencings across the nation was 2,436, a decrease of 19 from October 1, 2021. It was down by 92 (3.6%) from the 2,528 reported on January 1, 2021.