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The Death Penalty Is The Punishment Of Execution

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What is the death penalty? The death penalty is the punishment of execution, administered to someone legally convicted of a capital crime. In the reading selection “The DEATH PENALTY in AMERICA” Bedau says that “The history of the death penalty in America can be useful if roughly divided into six epochs of very uneven duration and importance (3)”.The author is saying that the history of the death penalty can be usefully if it is separate into different time period. The author says “first, from the colonial period up to the adoption of the constitution and the bill of right; second, the seven decades leading up to the civil war; then the five decades through the Progressive Era; third, from World War I through the post-World War II years; next the two decades from the 1950s to the 1970s; and finally from the 1970s to the present (3)”. The history of the death penalty in American start early 1700s to present day. British introduce Capital punishment to the colonial government in the seventeenth century (Bedau 3), the colonial government buys into the idea of capital punishment because colonial government had a lot in common with the British government. The author states that “although the capital laws of the thirteen colonies differed from each other in many interesting and important details concerning the death penalty (Bedau 3, 4)”. The original thirteen colonies had a different way of approaching the idea of the death penalty. During the century and a half of the colonial

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