In his first book since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Polio: An
American Story, renowned historian David Oshinsky takes a new and
closer look at the Supreme Court's controversial and much-debated
stances on capital punishment-in the landmark case of Furman v.
Georgia.
Career criminal William Furman shot and killed a homeowner
during a 1967 burglary in Savannah, Georgia. Because it was a
"black-on-white" crime in the racially troubled South, it also was
an open-and-shut case. The trial took less than a day, and the
nearly all-white jury rendered a death sentence. Aided by the
NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, Furman's African-American attorney,
Bobby Mayfield, doggedly appealed the verdict all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1972 overturned Furman's sentence by a
narrow 5-4 vote, ruling that Georgia's capital punishment statute,
and by implication all other state death-penalty laws, was so
arbitrary and capricious as to violate the Eighth Amendment's
prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment."
Furman effectively, if temporarily, halted capital punishment in
the United States. Every death row inmate across the nation was
resentenced to life in prison. The decision, however, did not rule
the death penalty per se to be unconstitutional; rather, it struck
down the laws that currently governed its application, leaving the
states free to devise new ones that the Court might find
acceptable. And this is exactly what happened. In the coming years,
the Supreme Court would uphold an avalanche of state legislation
endorsing the death penalty. Capital punishment would return
stronger than ever, with many more defendants sentenced to death
and eventually executed.
Oshinsky demonstrates the troubling roles played by race and
class and region in capital punishment. And he concludes by
considering the most recent Supreme Court death-penalty cases
involving minors and the mentally ill, as well as the impact of
international opinion. Compact and engaging, Oshinsky's masterful
study reflects a gift for empathy, an eye for the telling anecdote
and portrait, and a talent for clarifying the complex and often
confusing legal issues surrounding capital punishment.
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