The August 2006 edi­tion of the National Geographic Magazine con­tains a chart illus­trat­ing the prob­a­bil­i­ties of dying from par­tic­u­lar caus­es. For exam­ple, the chances of dying from heart dis­ease are 1 in 5. The chances of dying in a motor vehi­cle acci­dent dur­ing one’s life­time are 1 in 84. Far down in the list is the chance of dying by legal exe­cu­tion: 1 in 62,468. The very next item in the list is dying by a stroke of light­ning: 1 in 79,746.

In 1972, in his con­cur­ring opin­ion in Furman v. Georgia, which found the death penal­ty to be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because it was so arbi­trary, Justice Potter Stewart wrote: ​“These death sen­tences are cru­el and unusu­al in the same way that being struck by light­ning is cru­el and unusu­al.… I sim­ply con­clude that [the con­sti­tu­tion] 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.”

(National Geographic, August 2006, at p.21, Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 309 – 10 (1972)). See Arbitrariness.

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