Crimes Punishable by Death

Overview

All of the pris­on­ers cur­rent­ly on death row and all of those exe­cut­ed in the mod­ern era of the death penal­ty were con­vict­ed of mur­der. Historically, the death penal­ty was wide­ly used for rape, par­tic­u­lar­ly against black defen­dants with white vic­tims. When the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed in 1976, the Supreme Court left open the pos­si­bil­i­ty of impos­ing the death penal­ty for offens­es oth­er than mur­der, such as rape or even armed rob­bery. However, the Court soon ruled that the death penal­ty would be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al for the rape of an adult where no death had occurred. That ban was lat­er extend­ed to any non-homi­ci­dal rape by the U.S. Supreme Court deci­sion Kennedy v. Louisiana, and the Court com­ment­ed that the death penal­ty could no longer be applied for any crime against an indi­vid­ual where no death occurred. The ques­tion of whether the death penal­ty might be used for crimes against the gov­ern­ment, such as trea­son or espi­onage, remains unsettled.

At Issue

Many states allow all those who par­tic­i­pat­ed in a felony in which a death occurred to be charged with mur­der and pos­si­bly face the death penal­ty, even though they may not have direct­ly killed any­one. The case of unarmed accom­plices in a bank rob­bery in which an employ­ee is killed is a typ­i­cal exam­ple of felony mur­der. Since the death penal­ty is sup­posed to be reserved for the ​“worst of the worst” cas­es, leg­is­la­tures or the courts could restrict its use only to those who direct­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in killing the vic­tim. Prisoners have also raised claims that the aggra­vat­ing cir­cum­stances that make a crime eli­gi­ble for the death penal­ty are too broad, with some state death-penal­ty laws encom­pass­ing near­ly all mur­ders, rather than reserv­ing the death penal­ty for a small sub­set of murders.

What DPIC Offers 

Compilations of state laws are avail­able, along with notable court deci­sions regard­ing this issue.