Word: mccleskey
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...when Warren McCleskey, a black death-row inmate in Georgia, petitioned the Supreme Court in 1987, arguing that his capital sentence should be overturned because the race of his white victim played a significant role in his sentencing, his claim was rejected. Presented with data demonstrating that murderers of whites are four times as likely to receive the death penalty as murderers of blacks, the court allowed that the link between a victim's race and the imposition of the death penalty was "statistically significant in the system as a whole." But, the court concluded, no petitioner could rely exclusively...
...setback came in the case of Warren McCleskey, a black man convicted of killing a white Atlanta police officer during a 1978 robbery. Lawyers for McCleskey argued that race had played a part in his being sentenced to die in Georgia's electric chair -- the race of his victim as well as his own. The principal supporting evidence was a statistical study of more than 2,000 Georgia murder cases from 1973 to 1979. Conducted by University of Iowa Law Professor David Baldus and two colleagues, the study found that those who killed whites were 4.3 times as likely...
...court replied, but state death-penalty laws still cannot be held on that basis to violate 14th Amendment guarantees of equal protection under the law. Writing for a 5-to-4 majority, Justice Lewis Powell assumed that the study was valid but said it did not prove discrimination in McCleskey's case or in Georgia's death sentencing generally. "Because discretion is essential to the criminal justice process, we would demand exceptionally clear proof before we would infer that the discretion has been abused." To raise successful equal-protection objections, a defendant has to prove discrimination "in his case...
...make matters worse for opponents of the death penalty, just one day before the McCleskey ruling the court significantly restricted an earlier decision that had blocked the execution of certain defendants convicted under "felony murder" laws. Those laws, on the books in most states, allow murder convictions against defendants who took part in a felony in which a killing occurred, even if they did not carry out the killing themselves. The new case involved Ricky Tison and his brother Raymond, who as teenagers in 1977 helped their father and his cell mate to escape from an Arizona prison. Soon after...
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the same 5-to-4 majority that lined up in McCleskey, ruled that "major participation" in a felony "combined with reckless indifference to human life" is sufficient to justify a death penalty. For one thing, she noted, the Tison boys knew that their father was serving a life sentence for the murder of a prison guard during an earlier escape attempt. She sent back their case for an Arizona court to consider whether such reckless indifference had been a factor...