Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld newly enacted death penalty statutes in Gregg v. Georgia and two other cases, Professor Evan J. Mandery of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice says arbitrariness continues to plague the administration of capital punishment across the United States. In a piece for The Marshall Project, Professor Mandery revisits the death penalty in light of the constitutional defects that led the Supreme Court to overturn existing capital punishment statutes in Furman v. Georgia in 1972. He finds that “[w]hether one interprets the Furman decision to have been about — individually or collectively — excessive racism, a failure to identify the ‘worst of the worst’ among murderers, the death penalty’s sporadic use, or simple geographical randomness, the ‘guided discretion’ statutes endorsed in Gregg haven’t remotely fulfilled their promise. Randomness has not been reduced and in many respects has grown substantially worse.” On the issue of “sporadic use,” Professor Mandery cites studies that show state-level death sentencing rates for eligible crimes of 0.56% (Colorado) to 5.5% (California), both of which are dramatically lower than the 15-20% threshold that had raised concerns in Furman. States’ failures to identify the “worth of the worst” murderers is evident, he says, in both the expansion of death-eligible crimes (91.1% of murders in Colorado are eligible under the state’s death penalty statute) and studies that found no consistent differences in egregiousness of crimes that received death sentences and those that didn’t. “Whatever they may have written, [Justice] Stewart, Stevens and Powell’s true project in Gregg was to rationalize the American death penalty and make sentencing decisions turn on the severity of a defendant’s offense instead of random factors, such as where the crime occurred, or insidious factors, such as race.” Mandery says. He concludes: “On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, we can deem that project a complete and dismal failure.”

(E. Mandery, “It’s Been 40 Years Since the Supreme Court Tried to Fix the Death Penalty — Here’s How It Failed,” The Marshall Project, March 30, 2016.) See Arbitrariness and U.S. Supreme Court.

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