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18 BCE
First established death penalty law
In the eighteenth century B.C, the first death penalty law was created in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for 25 different crimes. For example, crucifixion, drowning, beating to death, burning alive, and impalement were some of the punishments used. Capital punishment was used for crimes like sexual assault and treason. -
10 BCE
The method of hanging (10th century A.D)
In the Tenth Century A.D., hanging became the most useful and known method of execution in Britain. In the following century, William the Conqueror would not allow persons to be hanged or otherwise executed for any crime, except in times of war. During this century other common executions were boiling, burning at the stake, hanging, beheading, and drawing and quartering. Executions were carried out for such capital offenses as marrying a Jew, not confessing to a crime, and treason. -
First known execution
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. He was shot to death. -
Controversy of the Death Penalty
In the 1800s, many people in America and Europe began to oppose the death penalty. Michigan abolished it in 1845 first and Wisconsin entered the Union in 1848 without a death penalty in its statutes. The movement against the death penalty grew stronger after World War II, especially in Europe. -
Error on the death penalty
Willie Francis was an African American teenager known for surviving a failed execution by electrocution in the United States. He was a juvenile offender sentenced to death at age 16 by the state of Louisiana in 1945 for the murder of Andrew Thomas (his boss). He was 17 when he survived the first attempt to execute him and the chair malfunctioned. After an appeal of his case taken to the US Supreme Court failed, he was executed in 1947 at age 18. -
Furman v. Georgia
Furman v. Georgia was a case in which the Court found that the death penalty was constituted cruel and unusual punishment in the case of an accidental burglary death. The court said the death
penalty was a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment because of the inconsistency in who was given a death sentence and who was not. -
Deciding the requirements of capital punishment
In Coker v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a penalty must be proportional to the crime and they negotiated the requirements of the death penalty. The three factors of a consideration of the offense's gravity and the stringency of the penalty; a consideration of how the jurisdiction punishes its other criminals; and a consideration of how other jurisdictions punish the same crime. -
Racism and the death penalty
In McCleskey v. Kemp, lawyers looked at how the death penalty effected certain people in Georgia. A study showed that blacks who had killed whites had been sentenced to die seven times more often than whites who had killed blacks. African Americans had been sentenced to die more than four times as often as whites. In its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that there seemed to be some statistical racial discrimination in Georgia’s application of the death penalty. -
Atkins v. Virginia
Daryl Renard Atkins was convicted of abduction, armed robbery, and capital murder and the supreme court case ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments, but states can define who has an intellectual disability. -
Most recent capital punishment.
The last and most recent federal execution was of Dustin Higgs, who was executed on January 16, 2021. Dustin Higgs was executed by the United States federal government, for having been convicted and sentenced to death in 2000 for his role in the January 1996 murders of three women in Maryland. He died by a lethal injection of pentobarbital.