Capital offense - sustany/dvg GitHub Wiki

A capital offense is a criminal charge that is punishable by the�death penalty. It is not necessary that the actual punishment imposed was the death penalty, but rather a capital office is classified as such if the permissible punishment prescribed by the�legislature�for the offense is the death penalty. Although crimes punishable by death vary from state to state, generally, capital offenses include first degree murder, or murder�with�special circumstances.�

For example, Virginia considers �willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing� in the commission of a robbery or terrorism among many others, to be a capital offense. Florida, in addition to murder with special circumstances, provides the death penalty for capital drug trafficking.��

Currently, 22�states�have abolished the death penalty. The federal government practiced capital punishment from the country�s beginning until 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia,� found particular applications of capital punishment to be unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. It was not reinstated until 1988, and then only for a very narrow class of capital offenses. In 1994, the Federal Death Penalty Act greatly expanded the number of eligible capital offenses to approximately 60.�

See e.g., Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280 (1976)