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If the Supreme Court could be one super hero, I think that it would be professor x. It would be professor x because he is always doing what is right for the people around them. The good for humanity, using reason and as fair as he can be.

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Copy of An Explanation of the Supreme Court

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Stay of Execution (Published 2013) by Evan J. Mandery

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This book is about the death penalty and how loads of people agreed with the death penalty as a righteous form of punishment for certain crimes. The people in this book make it such a big deal and up roar just to get the attention of the Supreme Court.

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Furman v. Georgia is among the oddest Supreme Court cases in American history. Decided in 1972, it struck down every death penalty statute in the nation as then practiced without outlawing the death penalty itself. The ruling, based on the constitutional protection against "cruel and unusual punishment," stunned even the closest court watchers. The death penalty seemed impregnable. It was part of the bedrock of America's legal system, steeped in the intent of the founders, the will of most state legislatures and the forceful - if occasional - rulings of the courts.

The 5-4 vote in Furman reflected a striking political split: all five members of the majority were holdovers from the Warren Court, known for its liberal decisions, while all four dissenters were recent appointees of Richard Nixon, who had won the White House with a carefully orchestrated law-and-order campaign. And notably, each justice wrote his own opinion in Furman, meaning there was no common thread to the case, no controlling rationale. The decision ran to several hundred pages, the longest handed down by the court at the time.

Explaining Furman and its implications can be tricky, but Evan Mandery, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has done both with remarkable ease. "A Wild Justice" covers a decade's worth of litigation, beginning in the mid-1960s with a daring strategy by death penalty abolitionists to grab the Supreme Court's attention and ending in the mid-1970s with an angry public backlash and a crushing legal defeat. Mandery knows how to tell a story, and he's done some terrific research. His judgments are crisp and generally fair-minded, despite a clear sympathy for the abolitionist side.

Still, at 534 pages, "A Wild Justice" contains few surprises. What Mandery has done, for the most part, is add depth to a now familiar tale.

The first sustained legal assault on the death penalty was organized by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and led by a group of young attorneys who viewed capital punishment as a civil rights issue because of the high percentage of blacks on death row. But defending a single race from execution seemed callous at best. "We felt a legal and moral obligation to extend representation to other clients, many of whom had suffered the same injustices," said Anthony Amsterdam, the Defense Fund's top litigator. With more than 600 prisoners awaiting execution, the group pushed two key arguments in the courts: flawed process and evolving standards of decency.

Flawed process referred to the combination of wide discretion and poor guidance facing jurors in capital trials. The end result, said the Defense Fund, was an irreversible punishment capriciously applied. Evolving standards relied on a different approach, challenging the death penalty's sacred-cow status in politics and law. Times change, the defense group argued, and attitudes do too. Americans no longer supported whipping or branding or public hanging. In a 1958 Supreme Court case on another matter, the majority had agreed "the cruel and unusual punishments clause must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." As the Defense Fund saw it, these evolving standards now included rejecting the death penalty as well.

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Credit... Yarek Waszul

Three justices seemed certain to buy in: Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, who opposed the death penalty in all circumstances, and William O. Douglas, who loved common people in the abstract, Mandery notes, but abused everyone around him in real life. Firmly on the other side were the four Nixon appointees: Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist. Their feeling about the death penalty ranged from Blackmun's personal squeamishness to Rehnquist's muscular support, but all agreed the issue belonged in the state legislatures, not in the federal courts. That left Furman in the hands of the two swing justices, Potter Stewart and Byron White.

Stewart viscerally opposed the death penalty; White did not. What united them was the flawed process argument, though for different reasons. Stewart sensed that for every person sitting on death row, there were hundreds more convicted of a similar crime - or worse - who were not sitting on death row. His intention in striking down current capital punishment laws was to force the states to single out the worst offenders.

White had a different agenda. The problem, as he saw it, was that capital punishment no longer served its main purpose - deterrence - because it wasn't used enough. Either execute more people or abolish the penalty altogether, his logic went. Pick one or the other.

White's decision to join the fragmented majority in Furman caught many off guard. Mandery's explanation is bold, to say the least. He asserts that Stewart met secretly with White and agreed to "abandon his moral position against the death penalty" in return for White's vote. Both men would join the majority to protest the flawed process of the current system, thereby leaving the door open for the return of capital punishment should the states write new and better laws. This, no doubt, is the book's biggest surprise.

Unfortunately, Mandery cites no source for the meeting because none appears to exist. "Their conversation is lost to history," he writes. "Neither man ever repeated what was said to their clerks or the other justices. They gave no interviews about it. Nevertheless they reached a clear agreement." Perhaps they did; perhaps not.

The response to Furman was volcanic. Public support for capital punishment shot up and new death penalty bills flooded state legislatures. Mandery rightly sees this upsurge as part of a larger reaction against a flurry of controversial Supreme Court decisions ranging from busing to abortion. But fear of violent crime surely played a role, as the homicide rate climbed in these years and Americans flocked to vigilante-themed movies like "Death Wish" and "Dirty Harry."

In 1976, the court heard oral arguments on five new state death penalty statutes known collectively as Gregg v. Georgia. To pass muster, the Georgia statute included a list of death-eligible crimes, a split trial separating the guilt or innocence phase from the punishment phase and a review of all death sentences by the state supreme court. Mandery is at his strongest describing the heavyweight battle between Solicitor General Robert Bork, representing the Ford administration, and Anthony Amsterdam. Brilliant though he was, Amsterdam couldn't shake Bork's deft portrayal of him and his supporters as extremists who yearned for nothing less than the complete abolition of the death penalty. The justices quickly picked up on this, with Lewis Powell asking Amsterdam, who is Jewish, whether he thought capital punishment was appropriate for "the commandant of Buchenwald." When the clearly insulted Amsterdam said no, Powell stared in disbelief. By a vote of 7-2 - Marshall and Brennan dissented, Douglas was no longer on the bench - the court upheld the new Georgia statute, ruling that it had fixed the problems described in Furman. The death penalty was back.

Though Mandery ends his rich account here, capital punishment marches on. About 1,300 people have been executed since Gregg, with Texas putting its 503rd prisoner to death just weeks ago. A clear majority continues to support the death penalty, though the fear of wrongful convictions appears to be growing, and evidence suggests that juries welcome the option of life in prison without parole. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has tightened the reins of capital punishment in recent years, ruling that the executions of the mentally retarded, people under 18 and those convicted of rape, even the rape of a child, are unconstitutional. For death penalty abolitionists, however, the promise of Furman must seem a distant, bitter memory.

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Furman v. Georgia is among the oddest Supreme Court cases in American history. Decided in 1972, it struck down every death penalty statute in the nation as then practiced without outlawing the death penalty itself. The ruling, based on the constitutional protection against "cruel and unusual punishment," stunned even the closest court watchers.

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Author: Quimbee
The main focus of this video is just very briefly explaining what the Gregg v. Georgia case was. It explains how it started and ended and what the courts argument and disagreement was.

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Gregg v. Georgia Case Brief Summary | Law Case Explained

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Author: United 4 social change
The main focus of this video went more in detail explaining the case Gregg v. Georgia. They go over what started it and how he was given the death penalty. They spoke about what the ratio was between the justices that agreed with Gregg and the ones who agreed with Georgia.

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Gregg v Georgia (1976): Supreme Court Cases | Academy 4 Social Change

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The main focus of this article is Justice Breyer disagreeing with the death penalty. In this article he explains how he thinks that the death penalty is "unconstitutional " and won't bring justice to anyone.

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Supreme Court Associate Justices Stephen Breyer, pictured, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called for a renewed legal debate over the death penalty.

The death penalty may be unconstitutional, two of the Supreme Court's liberal judges suggested on Monday.

In a dissent to the majority's opinion in Glossip v. Gross, which upheld Oklahoma's use of a key drug used for lethal injections, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called for a renewed legal debate over the death penalty.

The court has not ruled on the constitutionality of the death penalty at-large since Gregg v. Georgia in 1976 - though it has examined various aspect of death penalty protocols, including applying the punishment to the mentally handicapped, to minors, and via various methods - and Breyer wrote that "[t]he circumstances and the evidence of the death penalty's application have changed radically since then."

"Given these changes, I believe that it is now time to reopen the question," he wrote, adding that the past 40 years of the death penalty in America have led him to believe "that the death penalty, in and of itself, now likely constitutes a legally prohibited 'cruel and unusual punishmen[t].'"

The fact that the death penalty is applied so sporadically "is the antithesis of the rule of law," Breyer wrote. Citing numerous studies, the justice concluded that "the factors that most clearly ought to affect application of the death penalty - namely, comparative egregiousness of the crime - often do not. Other studies show that circumstances that ought not to affect application of the death penalty, such as race, gender, or geography, often do."

Breyer also cited concerns about "excessive delays" in death penalty proceedings and observed that around 20 states have abolished the death penalty outright, while many more have not executed an inmate in years. And he pointed to an emerging global consensus on the death penalty, noting that a clear majority of United Nations member countries have ceased executions over the past few decades.

Breyer and a number of other justices have previously expressed their personal opposition to the death penalty, but few have expressed outright the belief that the punishment violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. At one point in 2011, Breyer told an audience at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia that "[o]nly the legislature can abolish the death penalty," before arguing that public opinion could be swayed on the issue via politics.

But Breyer, in his dissent in Glossip v. Gross, recognized that while the issue of the death penalty, in and of itself, perhaps could be viewed as a legislative matter, "the matters I have discussed, such as lack of reliability, the arbitrary application of a serious and irreversible punishment, individual suffering caused by long delays, and lack of penological purpose are quintessentially judicial matters."

He concluded, "At the very least, the Court should call for full briefing on the basic question" of the death penalty.

The larger case at hand, Glossip v. Gross, did not deal explicitly with the constitutionality of the death penalty per se, but rather whether or not the state of Oklahoma's use of the drug midazolam as an anesthetic before executions prevented cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, argued that it did not, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the court's three other Democratic appointees, dissented. (The decision "leaves petitioners exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake," Sotomayor wrote.)

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in separate concurring opinions, were the only two to respond directly to Breyer's arguments regarding the overall constitutionality of the death penalty.

In typically colorful prose, Scalia said that it was "Groundhog Day" and that Breyer was trying to revive a long line of anti-death penalty activism even though the Constitution states that "no person ... shall be deprived of life ... without due process of law," effectively referring to death penalty practices in place at the time of the founders.

Scalia referred to Breyer's argument as "gobbledy-gook," while Thomas called it "pseudoscientific" and based upon an "imaginary constitutional rule against 'arbitrariness'."

Later, Scalia wrote that Breyer's logic saying excessive delays, caused by anti-death penalty activists, make the practice unconstitutional "calls to mind the man sentenced to death for killing his parents, who pleads for mercy on the ground that he is an orphan."

He concluded, "Justice Breyer does not just reject the death penalty, he rejects the Enlightenment" for arguing against a punishment that even the acclaimed moral philosopher Immanuel Kant supported.

Though the case ultimately left the feud between the two Republican appointees and two Democratic appointees unresolved, Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, which largely opposes the death penalty, said the vigorous debate sets up a future challenge.

"The death penalty itself, I think, is in trouble," Dieter said, pointing to previous decisions from Justice Anthony Kennedy suggesting he might someday side with Breyer on the issue. Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, Dieter added, are likely sympathetic to Breyer's reasoning despite their decisions not to sign the tangential dissent.

"[Breyer's dissent] says the court should be ready to debate the very constitutionality of the death penalty," considering it as it's applied in the 21st century and not as it was debated in the 1970s, Dieter concluded. "Times have changed."

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Justice Breyer's dissent: Death penalty may be unconstitutional

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The death penalty may be unconstitutional, two of the Supreme Court's liberal judges suggested on Monday. In a dissent to the majority's opinion in Glossip v. Gross, which upheld Oklahoma's use of a key drug used for lethal injections, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called for a renewed legal debate over the death penalty.