Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

2007

  • report

    Gas Prices, Disasters Top Public’s News Interests In 2007

    Summary of Findings Man-made and natural disasters dominated the list of the public’s top news stories in 2007. Nearly half of Americans (45%) tracked news about the shootings of 33 students at Virginia Tech University very closely, while nearly as many paid very close attention to reports on the Minneapolis bridge collapse and the California […]

  • report

    An Impassioned Debate: An Overview of the Death Penalty in America

    (Updated June 26, 2008) In this article: The role of the courts Lethal injection and the Baze case Child rape and the Kennedy case The history of the death penalty The death penalty worldwide Few public policy issues have inflamed passions as consistently and as strongly as the debate over capital punishment. Religious communities have […]

  • feature

    Death Penalty Timeline

    Timeline provided by Stateline.org Return to the death penalty issue page  The Death Penalty Since 1972 (Links to U.S. Supreme Court decisions provided by oyez.org and the Web site of the U.S. Supreme Court)  1972 Furman v. Georgia: The U.S. Supreme Court effectively voids 40 state death penalty statutes and suspends capital punishment, ruling that […]