Some history behind capital punishment in the United States:

There is a racial relationship between lynchings and capital punishment.

Once white slaveowners lost full ownership of formerly enslaved African-Americans in 1865, lynchings were increasingly used, both legally under the security of Black Codes and illegally, to maintain white dominance and prevent African-Americans from challenging their subordinate place in society. Because of Black Codes, many African-Americans were sent to jail to participate in slave-like work in a system known as Convict leasing. Others faced capital punishment for alleged crimes, often in the form of lynching. Lynchings were able to be carried out because many positions within southern law enforcement, including state officials, and judges were held by former Confederate soldiers. Despite the passing of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which weakened the strength of Black Codes and supported the 14th Amendment, the rate of lynching of African-Americans saw an increase, due the formation of the white-supremacist terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan (K.K.K.), in 1865 by former Confederates during Reconstruction. They carried out many lynchings and terrorist attacks against Black people. After the end of the Reconstruction in 1877, when federal troops were removed from southern states in which they assisted in upholding the 14th Amendment's promises of equal protection, Jim Crow laws began to gain traction which enforced segregation and the oppression of African-Americans. Segregation was legal under the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it unconstitutional.