On June 29, the US Supreme Court issued a monumental decision in Furman v. Georgia, stating that the US death penalty was unconstitutional because it was administered in both a racially and geographically discriminatory manner, and it converted all existing death sentences to life imprisonment. The decision saved the lives of 611 inmates in 31 states, including members of the notorious Manson Family in California, Sirhan Sirhan (also on death row in California), the convicted assassin of Sen. Robert Kennedy, and Richard Speck, convicted of killing 8 female student nurses in their Chicago residence.
Only a decade before, in 1962, the United States carried out 47 executions in 17 states, led by California (11) and Texas (9). Other executing states included: Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia.
The 1960s had no shortage of both global and domestic violence and upheaval. Yet, U.S. executions declined. In 1963 there were 21 executions in 13 states led by Texas (4); 15 executions in 8 states in 1964, led by Texas (5); 7 executions in 4 states in 1965, led by Kansas (4); Oklahoma carried out the nation’s only execution in 1966; and only 2 inmates were executed in 1967, in California and Colorado.
An unofficial moratorium on executions began in 1968, and it would last until January 17, 1977. This was a far cry from the nadir of U.S. executions, in the 1930s during the Great Depression when an average of 167 executions were carried out yearly.
The case of Furman v. Georgia actually had its origins in a death penalty decision in Arkansas in 1962.
William Maxwell, an African American man, had been convicted and sentenced to death for the rape of a 35-year-old white woman. His appeal had been rejected by the Arkansas state supreme court, and when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case, they returned it to the Arkansas state supreme court.
University of Pennsylvania law professor Anthony Amsterdam was contacted by the Legal Defense Fund and he led the effort in a petition for habeas relief, arguing that the death penalty was unconstitutional because “jurors were given no guidance about how to reach a decision, leading to arbitrary results; the single-verdict trial, in which the jurors had decided Maxwell’s guilt and sentence simultaneously, denied them the opportunity to weigh mitigating factors,” and due to claims of racial bias, showing that in the 2-decade period from 1945-1965, “black defendants who raped white women in Arkansas stood a 50% chance of being sentenced to death if they were convicted, compared to a 14% chance for white offenders.”