Teresa Lewis Case

On September 23rd, 2011, Teresa Lewis, a citizen of Danville, Virginia, was pronounced dead by lethal-injection at approximately 9:13 p.m. (Crawford 74). Being that 46 executions took place in 2010, Teresa Lewis’s case would seem indifferentiable to the others; however, evaluations of Lewis’s mental state incited controversy based on the morality of her case (“The Death Penalty…”). The controversy erupted after Lewis’s defense lawyer filed a position for clemency briefly after disclosing that she had an I.Q. of 72, providing the justification that Lewis “did not possess the intelligence to have planned for the killings” (“US woman Teresa…”). Much to the dismay of her defense lawyers, family, and advocates, Teresa Lewis still underwent lethal injection for conspiring to murder her husband and stepson. Capital punishment as a whole proves to be a fairly controversial topic around the world. The main …show more content…
Georgia court case that took place in 1972, the Gregg v. Georgia case circulated during 1976 and completely discredited the Furman v. Georgia court proceedings. According to The Harvard Journal on Legislation, “ Under Georgia’s new statute, an offender became death-eligible only if the offender was found guilty of a capital offense and then met at least one of the statutory ‘aggravating circumstances’” (Wang 514). In other words, the Gregg v. Georgia court proceedings reinstated the death penalty on the basis that it “does not invariably violate the Constitution (“The Death Penalty…”). As a result of this case, several states followed in Georgia’s footsteps, reclaiming the death penalty as a constitutional right. The Gregg v. Georgia court case is essential to the controversy surrounding capital punishment because it acknowledges the other side of the debate and completely conflicts its preceding case, Furman v. Georgia. Both cases provide the notion that the constitutionality behind capital punishment is still a subject that is up for