Death Penalty in Illinois and USA. The work is to be 9 pages with three to five sources, with in-text citations and a reference page.

I will pay for the following article Death Penalty in Illinois and USA. The work is to be 9 pages with three to five sources, with in-text citations and a reference page. The extent to which the death penalty would act as a deterrent against graver crime such as murder, rape, arson, and armed robbery, is not clear either. Illinois is one of the states in the US to adopt the death penalty and so far has hanged 12 prisoners since 1976. While a moratorium is in existence right now, Illinois has been vacillating over some crucial legal reforms as well. By April 2008, 37 states, the federal government and the US military had authorized the death penalty. Its outcomes are yet to be known.

The death penalty was reintroduced in the USA in 1976 on the aftermath of the case Gregg v. Georgia 428, U.S. 153. Since then little more than one thousand inmates have been put to death and the practice is becoming unpopular day by in the US. Out of the 37 states which have adopted the death penalty many have questioned the credibility and efficacy of it over the years because in many cases the death penalty has rarely acted as a deterrent to would-be criminals. A big question hangs right now over its future status.

The death penalty or capital punishment in the state of Illinois was adopted in 1976. After more than three decades of practice, its efficacy in crime prevention has cast a bigger cloud over the legislative assembly of the state (Clarke and Whitt, 2007). So far 12 prisoners have been sent to gallows in Illinois and the current moratorium was declared by the then Republican Governor, George Ryan, who passionately believed after the so called “Anthony Porter’s case”. Anthony Porter spent 15 years in the death row and was declared mentally ill just two days before his execution. Subsequently, he was exonerated when it was proved by a group of student journalists that the man responsible for the crime was somebody else.

Illinois’ checkered history of capital punishment has been offered as a comparatively better case study to commute death sentences to life terms or even to scrap the death penalty. In the first place, the state has a unique history of the death penalty with 12 inmates so far hanged and 13 remaining on the death row.