Issues of Capital Punishment and the Death Penalty
Uploaded by spootyhead on Mar 04, 2007
Issues of Capital Punishment and the Death Penalty
Twenty-six years ago, on July 2, 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 in Gregg v. Georgia to reinstate the death penalty after a brief official break. Implicit in the Gregg decision was the optimistic belief that the many problems identified by a previous Supreme Court decision, Furman v. Georgia, could be fixed. In 1972, the Furman Court had struck down hundreds of state laws that the justices deemed illogical. But the majority in Gregg argued that objective standards would minimize impulsive decisions of the jurors and reduce discrimination.
A quarter-century and more than 700 executions later, the promise of Gregg seems ridiculously naive. Gregg's ambition was to rationalize sentencing and ensure that death sentences would be applied more equitably and only to the most appalling offenders. It hasn't worked out that way. Today in the United States, more than 3,700 men and women await execution on death row. The overwhelming number of those put to death will be poor, members of a minority, uneducated, or of questionable sanity, and they will have been represented by some of the worst lawyers available. Clearly, it was absurd to assume that the state legislatures that had crafted the unconstitutional laws criticized by the Furman decision would suddenly fix them. The death penalty should be abolished if it can not be administered fairly and impartially.
Obvious racial discrimination in the administration of the death penalty remains routine. Nearly 90 percent of the federal inmates on death row are minorities. Also, more than 76 percent of the cases, in which federal prosecutors had sought the death penalty during the previous five years, involved a defendant who belonged to a minority group. In the same study, U.S. attorneys were nearly twice as likely to recommend death for an African-American defendant than a Caucasian defendant (Clay 118-122).
Under the beliefs established by Gregg, you might conclude that this would be unconstitutional. You would be wrong. In the Gregg decision, the Supreme Court said that a constitutional violation was established if a plaintiff demonstrated a "pattern of arbitrary and capricious sentencing." Since then, however, the Court appears to have abandoned this logic. In 1987, for example, it ruled that racial disparities are "an inevitable part of our criminal justice system." (Jackson 21-23).
Growing numbers of Americans have begun to question the rationality of the system that executes people....