Furman v. Georgia

There were over 600 inmates on death row when Furman was decided. Most states at that time did not allow the presentation of mitigating and aggravating evidence that since then has been a constitutionally required part of individualized consideration at sentencing. In McGautha v. California, decided thirteen months before Furman, the Court held that due process did not require instructions to the jury about standards to guide sentencing in capital cases. The Court also rejected a sentencing phase where mitigating or aggravating evidence could be presented to the jury. After McGautha the infrequency and apparent randomness of sentencing in capital cases raised concerns about arbitrary imposition of the death penalty and the potentially improper influence of factors like race and financial resources on sentencing outcomes. ==Case history==

William Henry Furman, Lucious Jackson and Elmer Branch were three petitioners sentenced to death for aggravated felonies. Furman was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Jackson and Branch were convicted of rape (the victims were white, and in Branch's case 65 years old). The case of Earnest James Aikens was dropped from the Furman case because the California Supreme Court decided in People v. Anderson that the death penalty was unconstitutional under the state constitution. Because the California Supreme Court knew that Aikens and the other cases were pending at the United States Supreme Court the Attorney General filed a petition for certiorari claiming that California had attempted to evade Supreme Court jurisdiction by applying an identical provision in the state constitution. The petition was denied and Aikens was remanded to state court. ==Supreme Court decision==

The Court's one-paragraph per curiam opinion held that "the imposition of the death penalty...in these cases constitute cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments." A majority of Justices agreed that arbitrariness in capital sentencing violated the Eighth Amendment. However, the justices could not agree as to a rationale. There was not any signed opinion of the court or any plurality opinion as none of the five justices in the majority joined the opinion of any other. It was the longest set of opinions the Court had ever written, over 233 pages. Justice White said the death penalty was imposed so infrequently that the penological justification of deterrence was weakened and there was "no meaningful basis for distinguishing the few cases in which it is imposed from the many cases in which it is not". Justice Douglas said: Justice Marshall said Americans "know almost nothing about capital punishment" and would not "knowingly support purposeless vengeance". Marshall rejected the deterrence justification by concluding "the death penalty is no more effective a deterrent than life imprisonment." Marshall commented further on the possibility of wrongful execution, writing: ==Dissents==

Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell, and William H. Rehnquist, each appointed by President Richard Nixon, dissented. They argued that determining the changing standards of decency and public opinion was a legislative function: The widely divergent views of the Amendment expressed in today's opinions reveal the haze that surrounds this constitutional command. Yet it is essential to our role as a court that we not seize upon the enigmatic character of the guarantee as an invitation to enact our personal predilections into law. Blackmun and Burger also stated that they personally opposed the death penalty, and would vote against it, or "restrict it to a small category of the most heinous crimes", but that it was constitutional. ==Subsequent developments==

'' (1976). The Supreme Court's decision marked the first time the Justices vacated a death sentence under the Eighth Amendment Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause, resulting in over 630 death sentences being vacated and reduced to life imprisonment. There were not many cases of serious recidivism, but there were a few homicides, including an especially heinous case in Texas where several young women were raped and strangled. Many thought the decision heralded the end of capital punishment in the United States. but there was a backlash and public support for the death penalty increased dramatically after the Furman decision. According to Stephen F. Smith the increase of public support for the death penalty was driven by the "politicization of the death penalty". He says "the number of executions might well have continued to decline but for the Court's effort, in the early 1970s, to impose constitutional limits on capital punishment". Many of the new statutes that mandated bifurcated trials with separate guilt-innocence and sentencing phases, and imposed standards guiding juries and judges during the penalty phase, were upheld in a series of Supreme Court decisions in 1976, beginning with Gregg v. Georgia where the Court said that "a carefully drafted statute that ensures that the sentencing authority is given adequate information and guidance" would meet the constitutional standard of Furman. Other statutes enacted in response to Furman, such as Louisiana's, which mandated imposition of the death penalty upon conviction of certain crimes, were invalidated for cases of that same year. ==See also==