Xinhua News

USA: Over 900 executions carried out in US since 1976: report

A total of 904 executions have been carried out in the United States since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated after the Supreme Court banned it 4 years before, a news report said Monday.

Of the 50 states in the country, 38 have adopted the death penalty with 37 of these states preferring lethal injection, the USA Today report said.

In addition, 10 states also practice electrocution, 5 stateshave gas chamber, 3 states have firing squad and 2 have hanging to execute the capital punishment.

There are no death penalty in the remaining 12 states, plus Washington, DC, the nation's capital.

Among the 904 executions, 737 were carried out with injection, 151 with electrocution, 11 with gas chamber, three by hanging and two by firing squad.

The death penalty was banned by the Supreme Court in 1972 after deciding that it was being imposed too arbitrarily, but justices reinstated the penalty in 1976 after several states changed their trial and sentencing guidelines.

Oklahoma became the 1st state to conduct a lethal injection in 1982, and since then the method has become the standard because it appears to give condemned inmates a peaceful and sedated death.

[again---this shows the incorrect nature of a story on the wire services, now picked up by foreign news....Texas, not Oklahoma, was the first state to carry out a lethal injection in the USA]

The way that executions are carried out has become the focus of several legal battles in recent years. In February this year, a New Jersey state judge ordered a halt to all executions in that state, ruling that research on the lethal-injection process was inadequate and that the state's procedure for carrying out executions were flawed.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear an appeal from an Alabama triple-murderer who says the state's plan for opening his veins in order to inject him with lethal chemicals amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, which is forbidden by the Constitution's Eighth Amendment, the report said.