Furman v. Georgia

Furman v. Georgia, legal case in which, on June 29, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the death penalty violates the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution when applied in an arbitrary or discriminatory manner. The decision effectively overturned all death sentences and ended execution in the United States from 1972 to 1976.

History

On the night of August 11, 1967, in Savannah, Georgia, 26-year-old William Henry Furman—a poor, uneducated African American man—attempted to burglarize the home of William Joseph Micke, Jr. Furman made noises that awakened Micke, who discovered Furman. According to Furman’s later testimony, Furman attempted to leave but tripped over a wire and fell, causing his gun to go off. The bullet killed Micke instantly. Furman fled but was caught soon afterward.

Before trial, Furman was taken to the Georgia Central State Hospital for psychological examination and declared mentally ill. Nevertheless, the court rejected Furman’s plea of insanity. The jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to death.

The case of Furman v. Georgia might not have been heard before the Supreme Court if not for another case, Rudolph v. Alabama (1963), which concerned a Black man named Frank Lee Rudolph who had been sentenced to death for the rape of a white woman. The Supreme Court declined to hear Rudolph v. Alabama, but three of its justices—Arthur J. Goldberg, William Brennan, Jr., and William O. Douglas—disagreed with that decision. In particular, Goldberg suggested in his published dissent of the Court’s denial to hear the case that the death penalty might violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Civil Rights movement

This statement caught the attention of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), which considered the abolition of capital punishment to be an issue of racial justice. While in the 21st century the death penalty is reserved for cases of murder, before the Supreme Court’s landmark 1977 ruling in Coker v. Georgia, rape was also punishable by death. And in rape cases in the U.S. that resulted in the death penalty between 1930 and 1972, 89 percent of those sentenced to death were Black.

With the assistance of the ACLU, the LDF began a campaign against the death penalty throughout the states by sending ready-to-file legal papers to defense lawyers across the country. These “Last Aid Kits” led to hundreds of stays of execution, effectively bringing capital punishment to a halt in the U.S. from 1968 to 1972.

Before the court

On November 9, 1970, the Supreme Court heard one of these cases, McGautha v. California. McGautha’s legal team argued that capital punishment was a violation of the Fifth Amendment under the “due process” clause, since the decisions of juries to condemn defendants to death were arbitrary. In a 6–3 decision, the Court ruled that giving juries the power to hand down the death penalty did not violate due process under the U.S. Constitution. The Court’s decision made the LDF’s strategy of challenging capital punishment on constitutional grounds look unlikely to succeed.

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Nevertheless, Furman v. Georgia went before the Court on January 17, 1972. It was argued with two other cases: Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas. In all three cases, the petitioners were Black men. Only Furman had been found guilty of murder; the other two were found guilty of rape. In the hearing, lawyer Anthony G. Amsterdam argued that the arbitrariness of the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause, and that it was often impacted by discrimination, particularly against poor, mentally ill, and Black people.

To the surprise of many, the Supreme Court agreed with the argument in a 5–4 ruling. Each of the nine judges applied different legal reasoning for his decision, leading to a rare instance of all nine judges issuing their own opinions in the case. Among the judges who decided in favor of Furman, Thurgood Marshall and Brennan found the death penalty to be cruel and unusual per se (always), while the other three—Potter Stewart, Byron White, and Douglas—believed the death penalty could be compatible with the Eighth Amendment if it were administered fairly. The problem for these three judges was that capital punishment was clearly not administered fairly; in Stewart’s famous words, the death penalty was “cruel and unusual in the same way being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual”—that is to say, its implementation was random.

Impact, short and long-term

The immediate impact of Furman v. Georgia was profound. The decision nullified every death penalty statute and overturned the death sentences of more than 600 prisoners, who were given life sentences instead. (Among them was William Henry Furman, who was paroled in 1984.) Many people believed that the ruling would mark the end of capital punishment in the United States.

Interactive: Explore the legal status of the death penalty state by state.

However, the death penalty remained popular, and so 35 states and the federal government passed new laws that reauthorized the practice in a manner designed to address the Supreme Court’s concerns. Georgia’s new death penalty law was tested in 1976 before the Supreme Court in Gregg v. Georgia. By a vote of 7–2, the court found capital punishment to be legal under limited circumstances if juries were given standards to guide them in their sentencing deliberations.

Despite its effective reversal by Gregg, Furman had a lasting effect on law in the U.S. Not only did a number of states choose to abolish the death penalty rather than reinstate it, but the ruling also strengthened the legal principle that the law should be fairly, impartially, and consistently applied, regardless of a defendant’s race or socioeconomic background.