Texas U. Florida U. This landmark decision held that the new death penalty statutes in Florida, Georgia, and Texas were constitutional, thus reinstating the death penalty in those states. The Court also held that the death penalty itself was constitutional under the Eighth Amendment. In addition to sentencing guidelines, three other procedural reforms were approved by the Court in Gregg. The first was bifurcated trials, in which there are separate deliberations for the guilt and penalty phases of the trial.
Only after the jury has determined that the defendant is guilty of capital murder does it decide in a second trial whether the defendant should be sentenced to death or given a lesser sentence of prison time. Another reform was the practice of automatic appellate review of convictions and sentence. The final procedural reform from Gregg was proportionality review, a practice that helps the state to identify and eliminate sentencing disparities.
Through this process, the state appellate court can compare the sentence in the case being reviewed with other cases within the state, to see if it is disproportionate. Because these reforms were accepted by the Supreme Court, some states wishing to reinstate the death penalty included them in their new death penalty statutes. The Court, however, did not require that each of the reforms be present in the new statutes.
Therefore, some of the resulting new statutes include variations on the procedural reforms found in Gregg. The ten-year moratorium on executions that had begun with the Jackson and Witherspoon decisions ended on January 17, , with the execution of Gary Gilmore by firing squad in Utah.
Gilmore did not challenge his death sentence. That same year, Oklahoma became the first state to adopt lethal injection as a means of execution, though it would be five more years until Charles Brooks became the first person executed by lethal injection in Texas on December 7, For the Media. For Educators. Fact Sheet. Later, the Court ruled that it was permissible to execute a person with the electric chair, for a second time, after a first attempt failed.
However, in the Court changed direction in Furman v. Georgia , when, in a very complicated ruling, a split Court decided the death penalty application was unconstitutional in three cases.
Furman, an armed burglar, had tripped while fleeing a scene, causing his gun to discharge and kill a victim. The Court also considered two similar cases in the Furman decision. The Court filed a one-paragraph per curiam ruling and each of the nine Justices wrote their own separate opinions. Only two of the Justices believed the death penalty was unconstitutional under all circumstances.
But the effect of the Furman decision was to place a four-year moratorium on all executions until more guidance came from a court challenge. The Court held the death penalty was not per se unconstitutional as it could serve the social purposes of retribution and deterrence. In Coker v. Supreme Court held that a penalty must be proportional to the crime; otherwise, the punishment violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.
In performing its proportionality analysis, the Supreme Court looks to the following three factors: a consideration of the offense's gravity and the stringency of the penalty; a consideration of how the jurisdiction punishes its other criminals; and a consideration of how other jurisdictions punish the same crime.
Twenty-one years later, in Kennedy v. Louisiana , U. Because only six states in the country permitted execution as a penalty for child rape, the Supreme Court found that national consensus rendered the death penalty disproportionate in these cases. To impose a death sentence, the jury must be guided by the particular circumstances of the criminal, and the court must have conducted an individualized sentencing process.
In Ring v. Arizon a , U. The Supreme Court further refined the requirement of "a finding of aggravating factors" in Brown v. Sanders , U. For cases in which an appellate court rules a sentencing factor to be invalid, the sentence imposed becomes unconstitutional unless the jury found some other aggravating factor that encompasses the same facts and circumstances as the invalid factor.
Kansas v. Marsh , U. Under Marsh , states may impose the death penalty when the jury finds any aggravating and mitigating factors to be equally weighted, without violating the principle of individualized sentencing. A legislature may prescribe the manner of execution, but the manner may not inflict unnecessary or wanton pain upon the criminal. State courts and lower federal courts have refused to strike down hanging and electrocution as impermissible methods of execution.
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