Death Penalty

While the death penalty was very popular in early America, its use has declined and increased with the judgments we will talk about in this paper. While one case made the death penalty virtually non-existent for several years, another law brought it back into popularity.

In the one important case, lawyers argued that the death penalty was administered at random. It violated the 14th amendment rights, because it was arbitrary and capricious. They pointed out that for the same crime, a person could receive a variety of punishments, one of which was death. Of the crimes that warranted death, sometimes a more serious crime would receive a life sentence, and a less serious case they would receive a death sentence. The Supreme Court did not take this claim seriously because it did not specifically apply to the murder case in question, but was rather a generalization.

A year later a similar claim was made to the Supreme Court in the Furman case, only this time they argued not that it violated the 14th amendment, but rather the 8th amendment. The eighth amendment protects us against cruel and unusual punishment. They did not argue that the method of death itself was cruel, but rather that the arbitrary and capricious nature of the sentence was cruel. It seemed to be more like bad luck that you would be sentenced to death, while others received simply life sentences for almost identical crimes.

The court agreed with this argument, and in doing so got people such as Charles Manson and others with pending death sentences off of death row. It also got several states to reform their death penalty laws, to better define who should be executed and why so it would no longer be arbitrary.

It was Gregg vs. Georgia that reinstated the death penalty, as we know it. In this case the Supreme Court recognized that the state had successfully amended their death penalty policies to make them constitutional. Although all the people who had had their convictions switched from death row to life imprisonment could not be changed back to the original sentance, new murder cases could now receive the death penalty again.

In the McCleskey case, evidence was given that demonstrated that for the same crime, black people were sentenced to the death penalty significantly more often than their white counterparts. The statistics compared both crime and race and found that black people were over four times more likely to get death. This particular death penalty sentence was not overturned because although the studies showed racism, they could not prove that in the specific case that it was a factor. Proving a specific case was discriminated against is very hard to do, since the Supreme Court did not accept prior data as evidence because it did not specifically apply to the case.

Herrera vs. Collins had an effect on how people viewed the death penalty because a man convinced of murder and sentenced to death was later found to be innocent of the crime. This was not the only case in which a person was first convinced and sentenced to death and was later found to be not guilty. Issues such as race (like mentioned above) can play factors in quick sloppy trials that may result in undue death penalties. The fear that a person, although convicted as guilty, may end up being innocent in the long run is one that many people consider to be a justified reason to disallow the death penalty all together.