Furman v. Georgia

Furman v. Georgia
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued January 17, 1972 Decided June 29, 1972
Full case name	William Henry Furman v. State of Georgia
Citations	408 U.S. 238 (more) 92 S. Ct. 2726; 33 L. Ed. 2d 346; 1972 U.S. LEXIS 169
Case history
Prior	Cert. granted, 403 U.S. 952.
Subsequent	Rehearing denied, 409 U.S. 902.
Holding
The arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
Court membership
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William O. Douglas · William J. Brennan Jr. Potter Stewart · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun Lewis F. Powell Jr. · William Rehnquist
Case opinions
Per curiam
Concurrence	Douglas
Concurrence	Brennan
Concurrence	Stewart
Concurrence	White
Concurrence	Marshall
Dissent	Burger, joined by Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist
Dissent	Blackmun
Dissent	Powell, joined by Burger, Blackmun, Rehnquist
Dissent	Rehnquist, joined by Burger, Blackmun, Powell
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amends. VIII, XIV
Abrogated by
Gregg v. Georgia (1976)

Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), was a landmark criminal case in which the United States Supreme Court decided that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. It was a per curiam decision. Five justices each wrote separately in support of the decision . Although the justices didn’t rule that the death penalty was unconstitutional, the Furman decision invalidated the death sentences of nearly 700 people.

The decision mandated a degree of consistency in the application of the death penalty. This case resulted in a de facto moratorium of capital punishment throughout the United States. Dozens of states rewrote their death penalty laws, most of which were upheld in the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia.

The Supreme Court consolidated the cases Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas with the Furman decision, thereby invalidating the death penalty for rape; this ruling was confirmed post-Gregg in Coker v. Georgia. The Court had also intended to include the case of Aikens v. California, but between the time Aikens had been heard in oral argument and a decision was to be issued, the Supreme Court of California decided in California v. Anderson that the death penalty violated the state constitution; Aikens was therefore dismissed as moot, since this decision reduced all death sentences in California to life imprisonment.

Background

In the Furman v. Georgia case, the resident awoke in the middle of the night to find William Henry Furman committing burglary in his house. At trial, in an unsworn statement allowed by 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 fired a shot blindly 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, according to the felony murder rule. Furman was tried for murder and was found guilty based largely on his own statement. Although he was sentenced to death, the punishment was never performed.

Jackson v. Georgia, like Furman, was also a death penalty case confirmed by the Supreme Court of Georgia. Unlike Furman, the convicted man in Jackson had instead of killing someone, attempted to commit armed robbery and committed rape in the process of doing so. Branch v. Texas was brought to the Supreme Court of the United States on appeal on certiorari to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Like Jackson, Branch was convicted of rape.

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.

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.

Justices Potter Stewart and Byron White gave very different reasons in their opinions. Stewart would only rule on the death penalty in the cases that were before the Court. In one of the most famous quotes from the case he said "These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual." He would not say the same of the death penalty overall. While he acknowledged that empirical evidence was "inconclusive" about the deterrent impact of the death penalty, he had the following to say about retributive punishment (subsequently supported by only four Justices in Gregg plurality opinion):

I cannot agree that retribution is a constitutionally impermissible ingredient in the imposition of punishment. The impact for retribution is part of the nature of man, and channeling that instinct in the administration of criminal justice serves and important purpose in promoting the stability of a society governed by law. When people begin to believe that organized society is unwilling or unable to impose upon criminal offenders the punishment they "deserve", then there are sown the seeds of anarchy—of self-help, vigilante justice and lynch law.

Justice White offered alternate reasoning for the decision in his separate opinion. For White, the constitutional violation arises when the death penalty is imposed too infrequently to serve a public purpose. He says the death penalty "loses much of its force" when sentencing authority is delegated to juries allowing them to "refuse to impose the death penalty" at their discretion "no matter what the circumstances of the crime".

Justices William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall concluded that the death penalty was in itself "cruel and unusual punishment", and incompatible with the evolving standards of decency of a contemporary society. Marshall commented further on the possibility of wrongful execution, writing:

No matter how careful courts are, the possibility of perjured testimony, mistaken honest testimony and human error remain too real. We have no way of judging how many innocent persons have been executed, but we can be certain that there were some.

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 a punishment provided in 40 state statutes (at the time) and by the federal government could not be ruled contrary to the so-called "evolving standard of decency". 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", if on the state legislature, but that it was constitutional nonetheless. In his dissent, Burger wrote, "in the 181 years since the enactment of the Eighth Amendment, not a single decision of this Court has cast the slightest shadow of a doubt on the constitutionality of capital punishment.

Aftermath

The Supreme Court's decision marked the first time the Justices vacated a death sentence under the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause, resulting in over 630 death sentences being vacated.

The Furman decision caused all death sentences pending at the time to be reduced to life imprisonment. The next day, columnist Barry Schweid wrote that it was "unlikely" that the death penalty could exist anymore in the United States.

The Supreme Court's decision forced states and the U.S. Congress to reconsider their statutes for capital offenses to ensure that the death penalty would not be administered in a capricious or discriminatory manner.

During the next four years, 37 states enacted new death penalty laws intended to overcome the court's concerns about the arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Several statutes that mandated 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, beginning with Gregg v. Georgia. Other statutes enacted in response to Furman, such as Louisiana's (which mandated imposition of the death penalty upon conviction of a certain crime), were invalidated for cases of that same year.

See also

• Capital punishment in the United States
• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 408
• Coker v. Georgia
• Kennedy v. Louisiana
• Gregg v. Georgia
• Baze v. Rees
• Glossip v. Gross

Further reading

• Hull, Elizabeth (January 2010). "Guilty On All Counts". Social Policy. 39 (4): 11–25, 15p. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016 – via EBSCOHOST.
• Oshinsky, David M. (2010). Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman V. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America. University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-7006-1711-1.
• Smith, Stephen F. (2008). "The Supreme Court and the Politics of Death". Virginia Law Review. 94 (2): 283–383.