Legislation
On March 7, 2006, the Wisconsin State Senate approved Senate Joint Resolution 5, which calls for an advisory referendum on the question of enacting the death penalty in this state as the Legislature may prescribe by law for cases involving a person who is convicted of multiple of first-degree intentional homicides if the homicides are vicious and the convictions are supported by DNA evidence.
On May 4, 2006 it came before the Wisconsin State Assembly with amendments and was approved.
The referendum passed on November 7, 2006, on a 55.5% to 44.5% vote. Sen. Alan Lasee (R-De Pere), who sponsored the advisory referendum legislation, has suggested that despite the low probability of pro-death penalty legislation passing through the Wisconsin State Legislature, he may introduce such legislation in the near future.
Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau informational bulletin on the death penalty
The United States is one of only a handful of countries that still executes people.
In 1972, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling brought this nation's executions to a halt. In its Furman v. Georgia decision, the Court found that state death penalty statutes were totally lacking standards and therefore gave too much discretion to individual judges and to juries. One Justice described the manner in which many states were handing out the death sentence as "wanton" and "freakish". The states responded by enacting new statutes that attempted to address the Court's criticisms. In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court upheld the Georgia death penalty statute as constitutional and the death march resumed.
With the passage of time, the number of executions has increased exponentially, from one in 1977 to seventy-four in 1997, to six hundred and ten in 1999. The size of death row has also increased, so that today's death row population of slightly more than 3,500 is the not only the largest in U.S. history, but the largest in any country in the world.
Nine states - Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin took legislative action to ban the death penalty, while three other states - Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont - did so through court decisions.
More than three-quarters of all executions since 1976 took place in Southern states. The reality is that lynching still exists -- it's just legal now. President Clinton's 1994 crime bill added 58 more crimes that are punishable by death. And his "Anti-Terrorism" bill limits the number of federal appeals for death row prisoners to just one within one year of conviction.
As governor of Texas George W. Bush personally signed death warrants for 100 executions.
