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Argument: Capital punishment is not "unusual" ("cruel and unusual")
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Supporting quotations
Thomas R. Eddlem. "Ten anti-death penalty fallacies". The New American. June 3, 2002 - "FALLACY #5: "Cruel and Unusual"
"The death penalty: Always cruel, always inhuman, always degrading ... there can be no masking the inherent cruelty of the death penalty." (Amnesty International)
"Capital punishment, the ultimate denial of civil liberties, is a costly, irreversible and barbaric practice, the epitome of cruel and unusual punishment." (ACLU Briefing Paper on the Death Penalty)
Correction: The death penalty is not unusual. All of the nations of the world have had the death penalty on the lawbooks throughout most of their recorded history, and the death penalty remains on the statute books of about half of the nations of the world. The death penalty was on the statute books of all the states of the U.S. when the Constitution was adopted. It is far more unusual to have no death penalty than to have a death penalty.
More importantly, the Founding Fathers who adopted the Bill of Rights banning "cruel and unusual punishment" had no problem with implementing the death penalty."
