1. There are several stages that seem to protect the rights of the accused. During jury selection, the court thoroughly interviews the jurors to ensure that they possess no pre-existing biases or prejudices. Also, the option given to the accused to have either a judge or a jury decide on a sentence ensures that the accused will not be a victim a single individual's opinions or prejudices. The accused in also given the opportunity to appeal their case to the and request post convictions reviews, such as an en banc review; the participation of the entire circuit court is designed to carefully consider the defendant's case once again. After reading about the various stages involved in issuing capital punishment, it seems that the process is thorough enough to ensure that all who are sentenced with the death penalty are indeed guilty.
2. The most humane method of the death penalty is certainly lethal injection. It does not seem to be "cruel and unusual" because it is essentially a painless process for the prisoner; they die while already unconscious due to the anesthetics. However, the methods such as hanging, firing squad, gas chamber are decidedly both inhumane and "cruel and unusual". These methods employ strategies that impart unnecessary amounts of pain and torture onto the prisoner. Seeing as how the United States does not condone the use of torture in prisons, this seems very unusual and against American ideologies.
3. Geographically, it appears that while the death penalty has been adopted by the majority of the states, almost all of the states that do not use the death penalty are in the north (the only southern state to not use capital punishment is New Mexico). The two states that seem to rely most heavily on the death penalty, or at least employ it most heavily as a form of punishment, are Texas and Florida. Although is shrinking in relevance in the the US judicial system and how it may affect one's sentence, one cannot ignore the fact that a disproportionately large amount of blacks are executed in Texas, a state that has a history with enduring racist views, as compared to whites. While this is not sufficient evidence to claim that these death penalty sentences are racially charged and therefore unjust, this fact is nonetheless relevant and ought to be taken into consideration when looking at the geographical distribution of death penalty popularity and frequency.
4. In my previous response, I commented that the South seems to have much higher incidence of the death penalty. I assumed this was perhaps just due to an overall higher crime rate in these states, meaning that it would make sense for the death penalty to occur more often in states that inherently have a higher occurrence of capital offenses. However, while the crime rate in the South is the highest, it not not by a huge margin: as of 2009, there were six murders per 100,00 people, whereas the national average is five murders per 100,000 people; this hardly qualifies as a large enough discrepancy to account for the disproportionately large number of death sentences that are handed out in the South. Overall, it seems that the Death Penalty Information Center is against capital punishment. Many of the statistics included on their page highlight how the death penalty is ineffective in deterring crime as well as having a long history of executing the innocent.
