Death Penalty In Colonial America Essay

The word “death” is adept at sending a cold, frightening shiver down the spine of any human. It is a major fear factor that has been lurking around the corner since the beginning of time, for governments have been using death to their advantage to threaten and bend people to their own will since the eighteenth century B.C. The threat towards one life for not adhering to government laws is called capital punishment, and it is still very much active in present day society. In fact, the death penalty has been in America since the colonial times, 31 US states still use capital punishment, and there has been numerous controversies surrounding the death penalty on whether it is being disproportionately subjected onto minority groups. Capital punishment was an idea brought to America by British and other European explorers. By the time colonial America was created, Britain had been applying the death penalty for centuries using various methods from hanging in the tenth century to boiling, burning at the stake, beheading, and drawing and quartering in the sixteenth century. Britain wasn’t the first to have death penalty laws, for there was the Code of King …show more content…
Some say it keeps citizens in order and is a necessity, while others claim that crime rates actually surge with the punishment of death. It’s difficult for many to predict what a world would be like without the pressure of execution, for it has been present since even before colonial America. It is possible that racial prejudice in court could plummet without the death penalty, and if there was not an option to send people to the grave, maybe juries would diminish looking at skin color. People could learn that the gap between races needs to be bridged. There is still a considerable amount of time to wonder about what America could be like since over half of the United States still uses the death penalty, but there will one day be a solution in the