Records say that the death penalty was created or established by the ancient laws of China and imposed by the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon for 25 crimes, but which excluded murder (Burns 2005). The first recorded death sentence was rendered in Egypt in the 16th century on a noble, who was accused of practicing magic and ordered to take his own life. Non-nobles were executed usually with the use of an ax. Legal executions first entered America in 1776 when British soldiers hung a suspected spy, Nathan Hale, during the Revolutionary War. The first to be executed in the electric chair was William Kemmler, who was convicted for ax murder in New York on August 6, 1890. The citizens of Tazewell County, Illinois in 1869 imposed their own justice on four brothers who terrorized them by lynching one of these men. The US Supreme Court in 1972 ruled that state executions were unconstitutional, but legislators lifted the ban on capital punishment in 1976. It ranked with China, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia as nations, which legalize it. As evidence of how much support had gathered for capital punishment in the US, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis' popularity for the 1988 presidential race went down when he opposed the execution of a first-degree murderer. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo could have lost the 1994 re-election because he vetoed death penalty bills. The number of executions rose. In time, the trend reversed when capital punishment showed that it ends in the state-sanctioned murder of innocent persons (Burns).

             Robert Stroud was the most notable inmate of the infamous D Block at the Segregation Unit of the federal prison in Alcatraz Island (Alcatraz.com 2005). He has been referred to as the Birdman of Alcatraz. Stroud was convicted manslaughter in 1911 after shooting a bartender for failing to pay his girlfriend for her sexual services two years earlier. Stroud began serving his sentence at McNeil Island, a federal penitentiary in Washington, where he proved to be a difficult inmate to manage.