{"id":33505,"date":"2022-07-06T11:34:29","date_gmt":"2022-07-06T11:34:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/?p=33505"},"modified":"2022-07-06T11:34:29","modified_gmt":"2022-07-06T11:34:29","slug":"death-penalty-in-50-years-since-supreme-courts-furman-v-georgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/07\/06\/death-penalty-in-50-years-since-supreme-courts-furman-v-georgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Death penalty in 50 years since Supreme Court’s Furman v. Georgia"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Anthony Amsterdam was in California and wide awake in the predawn hours on June 29, 1972, glued to the news as he awaited word from the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier in the court\u2019s term, Amsterdam, then a 36-year-old defense lawyer, had argued Furman v. George, <\/i>a case that asked the court to decide whether the death penalty was constitutional.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Amsterdam had led oral arguments on a six-person legal team representing multiple clients on death row. Among them was William Henry Furman, a Black Georgia man who had been sentenced to death for murder four years earlier <\/b>after a botched burglary during which Furman said he tripped and accidentally fired his gun.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cBecause the decision was slated to come down that morning, I had the radio on,\u201d Amsterdam told The Washington Post last Wednesday, the 50th anniversary of the Furman<\/i> ruling. \u201cI was listening in the dark.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As the opinions were announced, Amsterdam remembers reporters screaming over the radio about the court\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThese death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual,\u201d Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the majority.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The court ruled 5 to 4 in Furman\u2019s favor, determining that the death penalty was arbitrarily and \u201cfreakishly\u201d imposed, in violation of the Eighth and 14th amendments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The ruling led to an immediate de facto moratorium on capital punishment across the United States and invalidated the death sentences of nearly 700 people. The justices arrived at their final votes by vastly different paths<\/a>, writing nine separate opinions <\/a>for a total of more than 50,000 words \u2014 among the court\u2019s lengthiest rulings at the time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Three justices backed the death penalty \u2014 then changed their minds<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Fifty years later, the legacy of Furman<\/i> is as significant as it is complicated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhat\u2019s important about Furman <\/i>is that it demonstrated the possibility that the battle for abolition could be won despite the apparent odds, and it encouraged a community of purpose to wage that battle,\u201d Amsterdam said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But it would take decades for that battle to bear fruit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The justices didn\u2019t actually declare the death penalty unconstitutional in Furman<\/i>; rather, they found that states were applying it arbitrarily and in a discriminatory manner. Dozens of states scrambled to rewrite their death penalty laws, and in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia<\/i>, the court upheld most of <\/b>these news laws and the constitutionality of capital punishment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the aftermath of Gregg<\/i>, most states codified the death penalty, and death sentences and executions began an ascent to their highest levels of the modern era.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When the Supreme Court ruled in Furman<\/i>, annual executions had actually been on the wane for decades, after peaking at 199 in 1935. Death sentences were still handed down, but executions were dwindling and public support was sagging; by 1968, the year Furman was sentenced, fewer than half of Americans favored capital punishment for murder. <\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The ruling came on the heels of landmark decisions expanding civil rights and criminal justice reform, including Brown v. Board of Education<\/i> and Miranda v. Arizona. <\/i>Frank R. Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina and a death penalty historian, said the Furman <\/i>decision buoyed hopes that the death penalty could be ended permanently and the United States might become a worldwide leader in abolition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Instead, the rulings in cases including Furman<\/i> and Miranda <\/i>sparked a backlash, primarily driven by conservative politicians in the South, which spurred \u201ctough of crime\u201d policies that led to an explosion of executions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The four dissenting justices in Furman<\/i> had effectively laid out a road map for states on how to change their laws to make the death penalty less arbitrary and thus pass constitutional muster. States including Louisiana and North Carolina began mandating capital punishment for all homicides.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Those laws were overturned by the 1976 Gregg <\/i>ruling, but they showed \u201cjust how far the governors were willing to go,\u201d Baumgartner said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Between 1972 and 1977, more than 30 states legalized capital punishment. Executions climbed steadily, hitting a <\/b>peak in 1999, when there were 279 death sentences and 98 executions, according to data tracked by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Baumgartner divides the 50 years of the post-Furman <\/i>era into two distinct segments. First, there was nearly 25 years of growth and support for the death penalty. Then, after the new millennium, attitudes began to shift, and so did the legal framework.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Emmett Till\u2019s family calls for woman\u2019s arrest after finding 1955 warrant<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Supreme Court rulings in 2002 and 2005 found the death penalty unconstitutional for the \u201cmentally retarded\u201d and defendants who committed their crimes as juveniles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIf Furman instigated the \u2018tough on crime\u2019 period, we\u2019re now in the \u2018you can\u2019t trust the government to get it right\u2019 period,\u201d Baumgartner said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Meanwhile, states have steadily abolished the death penalty, and public <\/b>support for executions, which climbed to as high as 80 percent in the 1990s,<\/a> has plummeted back down to mid-century levels, dipping to 54 percent in a Gallup poll last year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Robert Dunham, the executive director of the DPIC, attributes the shift to a range of factors, including the rise of death row exonerations and greater awareness of flaws in the criminal justice system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIn the 1990s, you didn\u2019t have the stories about the drug-addicted lawyers or lawyers asleep in court or who missed the filing deadline by one day that led to their client\u2019s execution,\u201d he said. \u201cYou didn\u2019t have stories about prosecutors hiding exculpatory evidence, presenting junk science, coercing confessions or using snitch testimony that falsely implicated innocent people.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Many of those issues have been raised in recent high-profile innocence claims of death-row prisoners including Richard Glossip and Julius Jones in Oklahoma<\/a>, and Melissa Lucio<\/a> and Rodney Reed in Texas. <\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Melissa Lucio gets stay of execution so court can consider new evidence<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Since 1973, a year after Furman, <\/i>the DPIC and other groups have identified 189 cases of death-row inmates being exonerated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThat is one person \u2014 wrongly convicted, wrongly sentenced to death and exonerated \u2014 for every 8.2 people who have been executed,\u201d Dunham said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Last year, just 11 people were executed<\/a>, the lowest number since 1988.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The death penalty has also grown geographic isolated, which just three states \u2014 Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas \u2014 accounting for a majority of both death sentences and executions in 2021. Five counties, including Harris County, Tex. and Oklahoma County, Okla., account for 20 percent of all executions in the past 50 years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The majority of executions carried out in the present day are from \u201990s-era cases that wouldn\u2019t be capitally prosecuted in 2022, Dunham said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But he said the states and counties that remain dedicated to the death penalty are engaging in \u201cincreasingly extreme conduct.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Botched executions and an inability to obtain lethal injection drugs are forcing some states to return to methods such as the firing squad and electric chair <\/a>that were previously deemed too barbaric.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Fifty years after Furman, <\/i>few of the death penalty\u2019s flaws have been corrected; its opponents argue even more have come to light. It\u2019s a system that observers including Amsterdam see failing under its own weight.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt will be ended in a few generations at most, not through any decision of the … Supreme Court,\u201d he said, \u201cbut by the actions of prosecutors who increasingly cease to seek death verdicts, juries which increasingly refuse to return death verdicts, state legislatures and state-court judges who are increasingly in closer tune with a wave of public opinion that is increasingly repudiating capital punishment as penologically ineffectual, morally indecent and just plain dumb.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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