Furman v. Georgia

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Furman v. Georgia

Supreme Court of the United States

Argued January 17, 1971
Decided June 29, 1972

Full case name:	William Henry Furman v. State of Georgia

Citations:	408 U.S. 238; 92 S. Ct. 2726; 33 L. Ed. 2d 346; 1972 U.S. LEXIS 169

Prior history:	Certiorari granted (403 U.S. 952)

Subsequent history:	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

Majority by: none
Concurrence by: Douglas
Concurrence by: Brennan
Concurrence by: Stewart
Concurrence by: White
Concurrence by: Marshall
Dissent by: Burger
Joined by: Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist
Dissent by: Blackmun
Dissent by: Powell
Joined by: Burger, Blackmun, Rehnquist
Dissent by: Rehnquist
Joined by: Burger, Blackmun, Powell

Laws applied

U.S. Const. amends. VIII, XIV

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Furman v. Georgia

Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972) was a United States Supreme Court decision that ruled on the requirement for a degree of consistency in the application of the death penalty. The Court consolidated Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas with the Furman decision, and thus also invalidated the death penalty for rape. 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, thus the Aikens case was dismissed as moot since all death cases in California were overturned.

In the Furman case, the victim awoke in the middle of the night to find William Henry Furman burgling his house. At trial, in an unsworn statement allowed under 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 blindly fired a shot 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. Furman was tried for murder and was found guilty based largely on his own statement. He was sentenced to death.

The Supreme Court split five to four in overturning the imposition of the death penalty in each of the consolidated cases. The majority could not agree as to a rationale and did not produce a controlling opinion. Instead, each of the nine justices wrote separately, with none of the five justices constituting the majority joining in the opinion of any other.

Justice Potter Stewart, as one of the majority, wrote that "These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual. For, of all the people convicted of rapes and murders in 1967 and 1968, many just as reprehensible as these, the petitioners are among a capriciously selected random handful upon whom the sentence of death has in fact been imposed. My concurring Brothers have demonstrated that, if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to death, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race. See McLaughlin v. Florida, 379 U.S. 184 (1964) But racial discrimination has not been proved, and I put it to one side. I simply conclude that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed."

Justices Byron White and William O. Douglas expressed similar concerns about the apparent arbitrariness with which death sentences were imposed under the existing laws. Justices Brennan and Marshall concurred on the grounds that the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" proscribed by the Eighth Amendment as incompatible with the evolving standards of decency of a contemporary society. Because the opinions of Justices Stewart and White were the narrowest, finding only that the death penalty as applied under the statutes in existence at the time was cruel and unusual, theirs are often considered the controlling majority opinions.

Chief Justice Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell, and William H. Rehnquist, each appointed by Richard Nixon, dissented. They argued that capital punishment had always been regarded as appropriate under the Anglo-American legal tradition for serious crimes and that the text of the Constitution implicitly authorized United States death penalty laws because of the reference in the Fourteenth Amendment to the taking of "life."

In the following four years, 37 states enacted new death penalty laws aimed at overcoming the court's concerns about arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Several statutes mandating 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, led by Gregg v. Georgia. Other statutes enacted in response to Furman which mandated imposition of the death penalty upon conviction of certain crimes were struck down in cases of that same year.