There are 94 United States district courts. These are general federal trial courts, although in many cases Congress has diverted original jurisdiction to specialized courts, such as the Court of International Trade, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, or to Article I or Article IV tribunals. The district courts usually have jurisdiction to hear appeals from such tribunals (unless, for example, appeals are to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.)
Rob Paulsen
Robert Fredrick "Rob" Paulsen III (born March 11, 1956) is an American voice actor, singer and former film and television actor who has done many voice roles in various films, television shows and video games. He is best known for his roles as Pinky from "Pinky and the Brain". P.J. in "A Goofy Movie" and "Goof Troop", Carl Wheezer from "The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius", Raphael (1987) and Donatello (2012) from "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and Dr. Otto Scratchansniff from "Animaniacs".
Capital punishment in the United States
Capital punishment (the death penalty) has existed in the United States since before the United States was a country. As of 2017, capital punishment is legal in 30 of the 50 states. The federal government (including the United States military) also uses capital punishment.
The United States is the only Western country that uses the death penalty.
Before the United States became an independent country, it was a colony of the British Empire. The first known death sentence in colonial America happened in 1608. Captain George Kendall was executed by firing squad at the Jamestown colony after being accused of spying for the Spanish government.
In colonial America, people could be executed for many things. In the Jamestown colony, the first set of rules and punishments the colony's Lieutenant Governor wrote was very strict. There were 48 different capital crimes (crimes that were punishable by death). They included:
When some colonists decided they did not like these strict rules, they ran away from the colony to live with nearby Native Americans. They were brought back to the colony, tortured, and executed.
Each of the Thirteen Colonies came up with its own death penalty laws. For example, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was mostly Puritan, laws were harsh. Under its first capital punishment laws, which were effective from 1636-1647, people were executed for sodomy, adultery, witchcraft, blasphemy, bestiality, assault, rape, statutory rape, perjury in a capital trial, and murder. Later, the colony continued to execute people for witchcraft, including 20 people during the Salem Witch Trials. They also executed people for being Quakers and pirates.
Under the New York colony's Duke's Laws of 1665, a person could be executed for "denial of the one true God" or for hitting their mother or father.
Some colonies were not as strict. For example, the New Jersey colony had no death penalty, and in the Pennsylvania colony only murder and treason were capital crimes.
By 1776, most of the colonies had similar laws about the death penalty. In most colonies, the capital crimes were arson, piracy, treason, murder, sodomy, burglary, robbery, rape, stealing horses, slave rebellion, and counterfeiting (making fake money). Usually, people sentenced to death were hanged.
During the American Revolutionary War, British Major John André was hanged by the Continental Army on October 2, 1780. He was convicted of spying and helping Benedict Arnold.
The first slaves were brought to the Jamestown colony in 1619. Slavery was legal in the United States for the next 246 years, until the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution made it illegal in 1865. Until that time, slaves had no rights.
Slaves could be punished or tortured for any reason, or for no reason at all. Slaves who tried to escape or rebel were often tortured and executed where other slaves could see, to warn them not to do the same thing.
For example, in 1755, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a slave named Mark was accused of poisoning his "master." He was executed, then hung in chains at Boston Harbor so his body would rot. This was supposed to remind other slaves not to rebel every time they passed Mark's body. Twenty years later, when Paul Revere made his "Midnight Ride," Mark's skeleton was still hanging in chains at Boston Harbor.
During the 1700s, in the Southern colonies, an unknown number of slaves were executed, sometimes for things like hitting another slave, "fussing," or "sassing" a white person. Laws in the Southern colonies were passed allowing cruel and unusual punishments as well as capital punishment for slaves.
In the late 1700s, activists like Benjamin Rush began to argue that the death penalty should not be used. Between 1794 and 1815, eight states passed laws that made fewer crimes punishable by death. However, many southern states made more crimes punishable by death, especially for slaves.
Major reforms started to happen between 1833 and 1853. At that time, many executions were public events. By 1849, fifteen states had switched to private hangings.
In 1846, Michigan became the first state to abolish the death penalty, just after it entered the United States.
In 1852, Massachusetts's state legislature voted to allow the death penalty only for first-degree murder. The next year, Wisconsin outlawed capital punishment. In 1887, Maine's state legislature banned the death penalty.
The focus on the death penalty slowed while the country was busy with the issue of slavery and the American Civil War. However, in 1897, the United States Congress passed a law that made fewer federal crimes punishable by death. In 1911, Minnesota abolished capital punishment. Several other states also abolished the death penalty, but would start using it again later.
Between 1957 and 1973, six other states permanently abolished the death penalty:
In 1972, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in "Furman v. Georgia" that the way death penalty laws were written made them unconstitutional. They ruled that sentencing rules were discriminatory, because black people got sentenced to death more often than whites for the same crimes. Because of this, the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment, which violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. This ruling stopped all executions in the country. Between 1972 and 1976, there were no executions in the United States.
However, by early 1975, thirty states had passed new death penalty laws that they thought would satisfy the Supreme Court. They did. In "Gregg v. Georgia" (1976), the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia's new death penalty law was constitutional. It ruled that capital punishment was not always cruel and unusual punishment, as long as it was done fairly. This meant that states could start executing people again, as long as they had rewritten their death penalty laws like Georgia did, to say that the death penalty would be applied fairly. In 1977, executions began again in the United States.
In two major cases, the Supreme Court has limited who may be executed. In "Atkins v. Virginia" (2002), the Court decided that executing people with intellectual disabilities is cruel and unusual punishment, and is against the Eighth Amendment. Before this decision, between 1984 and 1992, forty-four people with intellectual disabilities were executed in the United States.
Also, in "Roper v. Simmons" (2005), the Supreme Court made it illegal to execute a person who was younger than 18 when they committed their crime.