Answer: Since our nation's founding, the government -- colonial, federal, and state -- has punished a varying percentage of arbitrarily-selected murders with the ultimate sanction: death. More than 15,000 people have been legally executed since colonial times, most of them in the early 20th Century. By the 1930s, as many as 150 people were executed each year. However, public outrage and legal challenges caused the practice to wane. By 1967, capital punishment had virtually halted in the United States, pending the outcome of several court challenges. In 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court invalidated hundreds of death sentences, declaring that then-existing state capital punishment laws were applied in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner and, thus, violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantees of equal protection of the laws and due process. But in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court resuscitated the death penalty: It ruled that the penalty "does not invariably violate the Constitution" if administered in a manner designed to guard against arbitrariness and discrimination. Several states promptly passed or reenacted capital punishment laws and by 1976 states were executing people again. Today, 34 states have laws authorizing the death penalty, as does the military and the federal government. Several states have recently abolished capital punishment – since 2004, New York (2004), New Jersey (2007), New Mexico (2009), and Illinois (2011) have abolished the death penalty. Alaska and Hawaii have never had the death penalty. The vast majority of post-Furman(“modern era”) executions have taken place in 10 states from the South and over 37% have occurred in Texas.
Explanation: sorry i write a lot
