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Right: Capital crime? In 1761, John Perrott was hanged in England after being found guilty of fraudulent bankruptcy. Perrot was one of the last to be hanged for what has become known as "white collar crime", but British murderers were still being executed three centuries later.


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Background information

The information below is abbreviated and re-organised from the Wikipedia entry titled 'Capital punishment in the United States'. The full entry can be accessed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States

The death penalty (otherwise known as capital punishment) is a legal penalty in the United States, currently used by 28 states, American Samoa, the federal government, and the military.
Its existence can be traced to the beginning of the American colonies. Along with Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore, the United States is one of four advanced democracies and the only Western nation that applies the death penalty regularly. It is one of 35 countries worldwide applying it and was the first to develop lethal injection as a method of execution, which has since been adopted by five other countries. It is common practice worldwide for the condemned to be administered sedatives prior to execution, regardless of the method used.

Early history of the death penalty in the United States
The first recorded death sentence in the British North American colonies was carried out in 1608 on Captain George Kendall, who was executed by firing squad spying on behalf of the Spanish government. Executions in colonial America were also carried out by hanging.
The Bill of Rights adopted in 1789 included the Eighth Amendment which prohibited cruel and unusual punishment. The Fifth Amendment was drafted with language implying a possible use of the death penalty, requiring a grand jury indictment for "capital crime" and a due process of law for deprivation of 'life' by the government. The Fourteenth Amendment adopted in 1868 also requires a due process of law for deprivation of life by any states.

The abolitionist movement
Three states abolished the death penalty for murder during the 19th century: Michigan (which has never executed a prisoner since achieving statehood), in 1847, Wisconsin, in 1853 and Maine, in 1887. Rhode Island is also a state with a long abolitionist background, having repealed the death penalty in 1852, though it was theoretically available for murder committed by a prisoner between 1872 and 1984.
Executions for various crimes, especially murder and rape, occurred from the creation of the United States up to the beginning of the 1960s. Until then, 'save for a few mavericks, no one gave any credence to the possibility of ending the death penalty by judicial interpretation of constitutional law', according to abolitionist Hugo Bedau, however, a pattern of abolition continued to grow.
Minnesota had abolished the death in 1911, Vermont in 1964, Iowa and West Virginia in 1965, and North Dakota in 1973. Hawaii abolished the death penalty in 1948 and Alaska in 1957, both before their statehood. Puerto Rico repealed it in 1929 and the District of Columbia in 1981. Arizona and Oregon abolished the death penalty by popular vote in 1916 and 1964 respectively, but both reinstated it, again by popular vote, some years later; Arizona reinstated the death penalty in 1918 and Oregon in 1978. In Oregon, the measure reinstating the death penalty was overturned by the Oregon Supreme Court in 1981, but Oregon voters again reinstated the death penalty in 1984. Puerto Rico and Michigan are the only two U.S. jurisdictions to have explicitly prohibited capital punishment in their constitutions: in 1952 and 1964, respectively.
Capital punishment was used by only 5 of 50 states in 2020. They were Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas.

The Supreme Court and challenges to the death penalty
There were no executions in the United States between 1967 and 1977. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court struck down capital punishment statutes in Furman v. Georgia, reducing all death sentences pending at the time to life imprisonment. This was in response to the claim that the 'arbitrary' nature of the application of the death penalty made it a 'cruel and unusual' punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States constitution.
Subsequently, many states passed new death penalty statutes, and the court affirmed the legality of capital punishment in the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia. Since then, more than 7,800 defendants have been sentenced to death; of these, approximately 1,500 have been executed. A total of 170 who were sentenced to death since 1972 were exonerated. As of December 17, 2019, 2,656 convicts are still on death row.

Federal executions under the Trump administration
The Trump administration's Department of Justice announced its plans to resume executions for federal crimes in 2019. On July 14, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee became the first inmate executed by the federal government since 2003. There are currently 51 inmates on federal death row. Thirteen federal death row inmates have been executed since federal executions resumed in July 2020.