Furman V Georgia Term paper

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Furman v. Georgia was a landmark case in the annals of American Law because it was the first time the Supreme Court turned to the controversial question of capital punishment. Capital punishment has always been a hotly debated issue in the United States. When this issue is coupled with the issue of racial discrimination, the matter becomes hotter than ever. And this is precisely what Furman v. Georgia was all about: a black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

The American public has consistently favored the use of the death penalty. Although anti-capital-punishment groups in the 19th century won some victories in slowing down the drive for death-penalty laws, most of their successes were short-lived. By the early 20th century, executions were common and widespread, reaching record numbers by the 1930s and 1940s, when more than 100 people were executed each year. But as public and official confidence in the effectiveness and fairness of capital punishment began to wane in the 1960s, the number of yearly executions dropped to the single digits. By the early 1970s, there was an unofficial end to executions in the country.

Opponents of the death punishment lauded the Supreme Court decision in the 1972 ruling that a jury’s unregulated option to impose the death penalty led toward a “wanton and freakish pattern of its use” that was cruel and unusual. However, the anti-death penalty lobby was not the outright winners because the court failed to call the death penalty unconstitutional. Just a few years later, capital punishment was back with full force in the United States.

Furman, a black, killed a householder while seeking to enter the home at night. Furman shot the deceased through a closed door. He was 26 years old and had finished the sixth grade in school. Pending trial, he was committed to the Georgia Central State Hospital for a psychiatric examination on his plea of insanity tendered by court appointed counsel. The superintendent reported that a unanimous staff diagnostic conference had concluded “that this patient should retain his present diagnosis of Mental Deficiency, Mild to Moderate, with Psychotic Episodes associated with Convulsive Disorder.” The physicians agreed that “at present the patient is not psychotic, but he is not capable of cooperating with his counsel in the preparation of his defense”; and the staff believed “that he is in need of further psychiatric hospitalization and treatment.”

Later, the superintendent reported that the staff diagnosis was Mental Deficiency, Mild to Moderate, with Psychotic Episodes associated with Convulsive Disorder. He concluded, however, that Furman was not psychotic at that time, could distinguish between right and wrong and was able to cooperate with his counsel in preparing his defense.

The victim surprised Furman in the act of burglarizing the victim’s home in the middle of the night. While escaping, Furman killed the victim with one pistol shot fired through the closed kitchen door from the outside. At the trial, Furman gave his version of the killing:

“They got me charged with murder and I admit, I admit going to these folks’ home and they did caught me in there and I was coming back out, backing up and there was a wire down there on the floor. I was coming out backwards and fell back and I didn't intend to kill nobody. I didn’t know they was behind the door. The gun went off and I didn’t know nothing about no murder until they arrested me, and when the gun went off I was down on the floor and I got up and ran. That’s all to it.”

The Georgia Supreme Court accepted that version. “The admission in open court by the accused that during the period in which he was involved in the commission of a criminal act at the home of the deceased, he accidentally tripped over a wire in leaving the premises causing the gun to go off, together with other facts and circumstances surrounding the death of the deceased by violent means, was sufficient to support the verdict of guilty of murder.”

One of the most interesting parts of the case is that the jury knew only that Furman was black and that, according to his statement at trial, he was 26 years old and worked as an upholsterer. It took the jury one hour and 35 minutes to return a verdict of guilt and a sentence of death. In essence, then, the Furman case as decided by the jury in Georgia was based on racial bias and bigotry.

The hot issues of the late sixties were civil rights/liberties topics such as racial equality, gender equality, affirmative action, the death penalty, and abortion. Most court decisions were associated with the powerful political and legal developments in American society. The term “social issues” embodies the deep divisions in American society over such issues as abortion, affirmative action, crime and punishment, drug use, sexual mores, and attitudes toward God and country. Several factors in American society have turned these issues into prominent political concerns that have affected both the role of the Court in American society and the substance of its decisions. An important source of this tension was seen to be associated with profound educational and technological developments in a post-industrial American society. Combined with the massive social movements of the sixties involving poverty, racism, and Vietnam, these educational and technological developments produced a middle-class and upper-middle class intelligentsia with liberal cultural values in sharp contrast to those of a new working class which had gained new wealth but adhered to the more traditional values of American society. These divisions have been a major part of electoral politics since 1968. There was strong support for the death penalty but racism was a topic that the new liberal class was against wholeheartedly. The injustices that were quite evident during Furman’s initial trial were not hidden from the public and there was intense pressure to recant a decision that was based on race and not on justice. Even the working conservative class had to some extent been won over to he anti-racism agenda. Those were heady days and anything resembling prejudice was apt to be thrown out the window. The question is why the initial decision went against Furman when the evidence against him was so flimsy. According to Robert McKeever: “In the debate over traditional versus progressive attitudes toward crime and punishment, the traditionalists have won out on the Court just as surely as they have elsewhere in the American political system.”

America may have become a land of liberals but the American South was still a conservative heartland. The idea that racial prejudice did not exist in Georgia was refuted by statistical and anecdotal evidence. The political mentality of lynching had been deeply ingrained in the American South. That is one of the reasons that Furman was first convicted.

Georgia has a long history of racist violence against its ethnic minorities. Between 1880 and 1930, 3,220 blacks were lynched by mobs in the southern states of the USA, 460 of them in Georgia; this compares with 723 whites during the same period (49 of them in Georgia). The lynching of blacks - without any investigation of the alleged crime - was socially acceptable in Georgia. In 1897, Rebecca Felton - a journalist for the Atlanta Constitution - when addressing the State Agricultural Society of Georgia stated: If it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession [a reference to the fear of the rape of white women by black men], then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary.” The best citizens of the community often led Lynch mobs. The mob that lynched a black man in Macon, Georgia, in 1922 followed the lead of the manager of a local hotel, the president of an insurance company and a local merchant.

To combat such attitudes, liberal organizations were formed that lifted their voices for everything from freedom of privacy to aliens’ and immigrants’ rights. One such organization that played an important part in bringing the Furman case to the Supreme Court was the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). ACLU is a non-profit-making litigation and lobbying organization founded in 1920. Originally established to defend conscientious objectors during World War I, the organization later expanded its activities to include defending “freedom of expression, privacy, due process, and equal protection—in a non-partisan fashion on behalf of anyone, irrespective of how unpopular the cause.” The ACLU is one of the most powerful minority rights organization. They offer alternatives and solutions to the utilization of capital punishment. Haines writes: “the organization has advocated alternatives to non-violent offenders; the decriminalization of drugs and greater resources for drug treatment and rehabilitation; community policing; more adequate victim services, including compensation, counseling, and the right to be kept informed about the prosecution of offenders, and the incapacitation of dangerous offenders through very long prison sentences as an alternative to the death penalty”. The politically charged climate of the late sixties was perfect for the ACLU to launch its attack against the Furman case and become instrumental in approaching the Supreme Court.

Another prolific anti-death group to come out of the sixties was Amnesty International. They are absolutely against any form of capital punishment. It is a human rights organization that fights for the rights of oppressed people all over the world, including those on Death Row. It was established in 1961 to fight for the release of people imprisoned for their political beliefs. It was the political clout of these organizations that was largely responsible for bringing the Furman issue to the Supreme Court and having the decision reversed.

Conservatives ran the southern courts and the issues of racial integration hadn’t had much effect on those who ran the legal system. Throughout American history...

1. Amnesty International Country Report: The death penalty in Georgia: racist, arbitrary and unfair. 1996.
2. Brundage, Fitzhugh. “Lynching in the New South.”
3. Castberg, Didrick and Victor Rosenblum. Cases on Constitutional Law. Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1973.
4. Focus Spring 1997. Volume XII, Number 2
5. Furman V. Georgia 408 U.S. 238 (1972) U. S. Supreme Court. Decided June 29, 1972
6. Gregg v. Georgia 428 U.S. 153 (1976) U.S. Supreme Court
7. Haines, Herbert. Against Capital Punishment. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996.
8. Kronenwetter, Michael. Capital Punishment:A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. 1993.
9. McKeever, Robert J. Raw Judicial Power? The Supreme Court And American Society. Second Edition. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995.
10. Rovella, David E. “Danger of Executing the Innocent on the Rise: Four-year study shows that more innocent people are being sent to death row.” The National Law Journal (p. A01) Monday, August 4, 1997. You should cite this paper as follows:

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