Racial Discrimination in Trials

All five rightnesss which collected the majority found themselves in agreement that the arbitrary cosmosner in which these states imposed the close penalisation discriminated against racial minorities. Justice William O. Douglas found that it is "'cruel and unusual' punishment [and violative of the defendants' rights to equal protection and delinquent process under the Fifth Amendment] "to apply the death penalty . . . selectively to minorities." He found at 353 that the statutes in foreland under which juries could recommend the death penalty as they see fit in murder and rape cases to be, as he state at 359, "unconstitutional in their operation. They are expectant with discrimination." Brennan agreed, stating at 379, that "the State may non arbitrarily chew the fat an unusually severe punishment." Marshall cited statistics showing that negroes were executed faraway more often than whites in proportion to their share of the community or the number of crimes they committed. He express at 422 that "the bear down of capital punishment falls upon the poor, ignorant, and the underprivileged."

Justice Potter Stewart would not rule out the constitutionality of all death penalty statutes, still found at 390 that "the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the aggravator of a sentence of death under legal systems that admit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and freakishly imposed." Justice Byron Whit

Justices Brennan, Marshall, Blackmun and John capital of Minnesota Stevens issued biting dissents from the opinion of the majority. Brennan said at 325 that "the risk that consort influenced McCleskey's sentence is intolerable by any imaginable standard.

" Blackmun said at 345 that "the Court today sanctions the execution of a man despite his presentation of evidence that establishes a constitutionally intolerable level of racial based discrimination." Stevens said at 366 that "the studies lay down a strong probability that McCleskey's sentencing jury . . . was influenced by the particular that [he] is black and his victim was white . . . This sort of disparity is constitutionally intolerable."

McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987).

Enmond v. Florida, 458 U.S. 782 (1982).

That great bulwark of civil liberties, the Supreme Court, proved incapable in McCleskey v. Kemp of advancing the cause of equal protection for blacks sentenced to death for murder.

Justices Harry Blackmun, Chief Justice Warren Burger, Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist disagreed, basically on the grounds that discrimination based on race had not been proven and that it was the function of the legislatures not the Courts to abolish capital punishment. Powell said at 479 "this is a classic case for the exercise of our oft-announced homage to judicial restraint."

Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1986).

Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1982).

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