Capital punishment in the United States
Death penalty debaters argue about whether capital punishment is "cruel and unusual punishment" (which would be unconstitutional).  Even the people on the Supreme Court have disagreed on this issue.  In 2004, the Court ruled in Baze v. Rice that even if an execution causes pain, that does not make it cruel and unusual.  However, in his dissenting opinion in Gregg v. Georgia, Justice William Brennan wrote that the death penalty is "an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain... [it] is today a cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the ... Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments."