Complete 6 pages APA formatted article: Disparity in Capital Punishment Between the Northern and Southern States. Elected officials during the civil war era gave complete authority over executions to the State level of Government. This led to the institutionalizing of the death penalty though it was done this way to restrain Judges from acting overzealously. With capital punishment reform also came newer ways of carrying out capital punishment. The close of the nineteenth century saw the advent of the electric chair for use in capital punishment and lethal injection later became a manner used considered more humane.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century race relations were at fever pitch and many executions in the South took place, handled by groups of white individuals in a lynching that involved hanging black individuals with no trial of any nature. When this lynch mobbing had nearly ceased in 1930, authorized execution rates rose. The reaction of Americans following World War II to the heinous crimes committed and the 6 million Jews who had been killed by State order gave Americans second thoughts on using execution as a means of punishment. There were no executions in the United States whatsoever between 1967 and 1972. The end of the death penalty came at a time when the civil rights movement was striving hard in this direction, claiming a disproportionate number of blacks were being executed over whites for the same or similar crimes.

At the conclusion of Vietnam and the civil rights, movement the legislature sought ways in which to make the death penalty seemed humane and fairly administered, administered without regard to skin color. As a result, many States required the Supreme Court to review the case before capital punishment could be handed down. A later case brought before the Supreme Court was shown fair and just leading the way for the death penalty’s return in all other states. There were much excitement and eagerness on the part of the pro-death penalty lobbyists for the&nbsp.first man, named Spenkelink, to be executed to be white, avoiding any racial conflict in an already tense situation. Despite dramatic last-minute appeals Spenkelink was put to death in the Florida electric chair in 1979.