Posts tagged Automatic Death Penalty
Mitigation, Time, and the Immorality of Death

The death penalty is a widely contested form of punishment plaguing legal theorists, juries, and society as a whole today. Current death penalty jurisprudence in the United States, which developed as a reaction to the brief abolition of the death penalty following Furman v. Georgia in 1972, has created an arbitrary and immoral system that relies upon a balance between aggravating and mitigating factors. An aggravating factor is “any fact or circumstance that increases the severity or culpability of a criminal act,” [1] and a mitigating factor is “any fact or circumstance that lessens the severity or culpability of a criminal act.”

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