Furman v. Georgia, was a United States Supreme Court decision that ruled on the requirement for a degree of consistency in the application of the
death penaltyCapital punishment or the death penalty, is the execution of a person by judicial process as a punishment for an offense. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences....
. The Court consolidated
Jackson v. Georgia and
Branch v. Texas with the
Furman decision, and thus also invalidated the death penalty for rape. The court had also intended to include the case of
Aikens v. CaliforniaAikens v. California, 406 U.S. 813 was a decision of the United States Supreme Court where a petitioner was appealing his conviction and death sentence, after oral argument had been made on the case, but before the court decided on it, the California Supreme Court in California v. Anderson, 6 Cal...
, but between the time
Aikens had been heard in oral argument and a decision was to be issued, the
Supreme Court of CaliforniaThe Supreme Court of California is the state supreme court of California. It is headquartered in San Francisco, and regularly holds sessions at its branch offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento. Its decisions are binding on all other California state courts....
decided in
California v. AndersonThe People of the State of California v. Robert Page Anderson, 493 P.2d 880, 6 Cal. 3d 628 , was a landmark case in the state of California that outlawed the use of capital punishment...
that the death penalty violated the state constitution, thus the
Aikens case was dismissed as moot since all death cases in California were overturned.
In the
Furman case, the victim awoke in the middle of the night to find
William Henry FurmanWilliam Henry Furman was the central figure in Furman v. Georgia, the case in which the United States Supreme Court outlawed most uses of the death penalty in the United States. Furman was convicted of murdering, during a home invasion, William Micke, a father of 5, in Savannah, Georgia on August...
burglingBurglary is a crime, the essence of which is entry into a building for the purposes of committing an offence. Usually that offence will be theft, but most jurisdictions specify others which fall within the ambit of burglary...
his house.
Furman v. Georgia, was a United States Supreme Court decision that ruled on the requirement for a degree of consistency in the application of the
death penaltyCapital punishment or the death penalty, is the execution of a person by judicial process as a punishment for an offense. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences....
. The Court consolidated
Jackson v. Georgia and
Branch v. Texas with the
Furman decision, and thus also invalidated the death penalty for rape. The court had also intended to include the case of
Aikens v. CaliforniaAikens v. California, 406 U.S. 813 was a decision of the United States Supreme Court where a petitioner was appealing his conviction and death sentence, after oral argument had been made on the case, but before the court decided on it, the California Supreme Court in California v. Anderson, 6 Cal...
, but between the time
Aikens had been heard in oral argument and a decision was to be issued, the
Supreme Court of CaliforniaThe Supreme Court of California is the state supreme court of California. It is headquartered in San Francisco, and regularly holds sessions at its branch offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento. Its decisions are binding on all other California state courts....
decided in
California v. AndersonThe People of the State of California v. Robert Page Anderson, 493 P.2d 880, 6 Cal. 3d 628 , was a landmark case in the state of California that outlawed the use of capital punishment...
that the death penalty violated the state constitution, thus the
Aikens case was dismissed as moot since all death cases in California were overturned.
Background
In the
Furman case, the victim awoke in the middle of the night to find
William Henry FurmanWilliam Henry Furman was the central figure in Furman v. Georgia, the case in which the United States Supreme Court outlawed most uses of the death penalty in the United States. Furman was convicted of murdering, during a home invasion, William Micke, a father of 5, in Savannah, Georgia on August...
burglingBurglary is a crime, the essence of which is entry into a building for the purposes of committing an offence. Usually that offence will be theft, but most jurisdictions specify others which fall within the ambit of burglary...
his house. At trial, in an unsworn statement allowed under Georgia criminal procedure, Furman said that while trying to escape, he tripped and the weapon he was carrying fired accidentally, killing the victim. This contradicted his prior statement to police that he had turned and blindly fired a shot while fleeing. In either event, because the shooting occurred during the commission of a felony, Furman would have been guilty of murder and eligible for the death penalty under then-extant state law. Furman was tried for murder and was found guilty based largely on his own statement. He was sentenced to death.
Holding
In a 5-4 decision, the Court's one-page
per curiam opinion held that the imposition of the death penalty in these cases constituted cruel and unusual punishment and violated the Constitution. In over two hundred pages of concurrence and dissents, the justices articulated their views on this controversial subject. Only Justices Brennan and Marshall believed the death penalty to be unconstitutional in all instances. Other concurrences focused on the arbitrary nature with which death sentences have been imposed, often indicating a racial bias against black defendants. The Court's decision forced states and the national legislature to rethink their statutes for capital offenses to assure that the death penalty would not be administered in a capricious or discriminatory manner.
Analysis
The Supreme Court split five to four in overturning the imposition of the death penalty in each of the consolidated cases. The majority could not agree as to a rationale and did not produce a controlling opinion. Instead, each of the nine justices wrote separately, with none of the five justices constituting the majority joining in the opinion of any other.
Justice
Potter StewartPotter Stewart was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. On the Court, he made major contributions to criminal justice reform, civil rights, access to the courts, and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, among other areas.-Education:Stewart was born in Jackson, Michigan,...
, as one of the majority, wrote that:
"These death sentences are cruel and unusualCruel and unusual punishment is a statement implying that governments shall not inflict suffering or humiliation on the condemned as punishment for crimes, regardless of their degree of severity...
in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual. For, of all the people convicted of rapes and murders in 1967 and 1968, many just as reprehensible as these, the petitioners are among a capriciously selected random handful upon whom the sentence of death has in fact been imposed. My concurring Brothers have demonstrated that, if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to death, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race. See McLaughlin v. FloridaMcLaughlin v. Florida 379 U.S. 184 , was a case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that a cohabitation law of Florida, part of the state's anti-miscegenation laws, was unconstitutional. The law prohibited habitual cohabitation by two unmarried people of opposite sex, if one is black,...
, 379 U.S. 184 (1964) But racial discrimination has not been proved, and I put it to one side. I simply conclude that the EighthThe Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights which prohibits the federal government from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines or cruel and unusual punishments. The phrases employed are taken from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. In...
and Fourteenth AmendmentsThe Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, along with the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, was adopted after the Civil War as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. It was adopted on July 9, 1868....
cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed."
Concurrences
- Justices Byron White
Byron Raymond "Whizzer" White won fame both as a football running back and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Appointed to the court by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, he served until his retirement in 1993...
and William O. DouglasWilliam Orville Douglas was a United States Supreme Court Associate Justice. With a term lasting 36 years and 209 days, he is the longest-serving justice in the history of the Supreme Court...
expressed similar concerns about the apparent arbitrariness with which death sentences were imposed under the existing laws.
- Justices Brennan and Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was an American jurist and the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Before becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of...
concurred on the grounds that the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" proscribed by the Eighth Amendment as incompatible with the evolving standards of decency of a contemporary society. Because the opinions of Justices Stewart and White were the narrowest, finding only that the death penalty as applied under the statutes in existence at the time was cruel and unusual, theirs are often considered the controlling majority opinions.
Dissents
Chief Justice Burger and Justices
Harry BlackmunHarold Andrew Blackmun was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 until 1994. He is best known as the author of Roe v. Wade.-Early years and professional career:...
, Lewis F. Powell, and William H. Rehnquist, each appointed by
President Richard NixonRichard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States and is the only president to resign the office. He was also the 36th Vice President of the United States ....
, dissented. They argued that capital punishment had always been regarded as appropriate under the
Anglo-American legal traditionCommon law is law developed by judges through decisions of courts and similar tribunals , rather than through legislative statutes or executive action, and to corresponding legal systems that rely on precedential case law....
for serious crimes and that the text of the Constitution implicitly authorized
United States death penalty lawsCapital punishment in the United States varies by jurisdiction and is applied rarely, in practice only for aggravated murder and even more rarely for felony murder or contract killing. The history of U.S. capital punishment begins in the colonies under the laws of their mother countries and was...
because of the reference in the Fourteenth Amendment to the taking of "life."
Aftermath
In the following four years, 37 states enacted new death penalty laws aimed at overcoming the court's concerns about arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Several statutes mandating bifurcated trials, with separate guilt-innocence and sentencing phases, and imposing standards to guide the discretion of juries and judges in imposing capital sentences, were upheld in a series of Supreme Court decisions in 1976, led by
Gregg v. GeorgiaGregg v. Georgia, Proffitt v. Florida, Jurek v. Texas, Woodson v. North Carolina, and Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 153 , reaffirmed the Supreme Court's acceptance of the use of the death penalty in the United States, upholding, in particular, the death sentence imposed on Troy Leon Gregg. In its...
. Other statutes enacted in response to
Furman which mandated imposition of the death penalty upon conviction of certain crimes were struck down in cases of that same year.
See also
- List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 408
- Capital Jury Project
The Capital Jury Project is a consortium of university-based research studies on the decision-making of jurors in death penalty cases in the United States. It was founded in 1991 and is supported by the National Science Foundation...
- McCleskey v. Kemp
McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 , was a United States court case, which eventually came before the Supreme Court of the United States, that Dan T. Coenen describes as being the “most far-reaching post-Gregg challenge to capital sentencing.” Anthony G...
External links