Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America (Landmark Law Cases and American Society) - Hardcover

Oshinsky, David M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0700617108 ISBN 13: 9780700617104

Publisher: University Press of Kansas, 2010

Synopsis

In his first book since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Polio: An American Story, renowned historian David Oshinsky takes a new and closer look at the Supreme Court's controversial and much-debated stances on capital punishment-in the landmark case of Furman v. Georgia.

Career criminal William Furman shot and killed a homeowner during a 1967 burglary in Savannah, Georgia. Because it was a "black-on-white" crime in the racially troubled South, it also was an open-and-shut case. The trial took less than a day, and the nearly all-white jury rendered a death sentence. Aided by the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, Furman's African-American attorney, Bobby Mayfield, doggedly appealed the verdict all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1972 overturned Furman's sentence by a narrow 5-4 vote, ruling that Georgia's capital punishment statute, and by implication all other state death-penalty laws, was so arbitrary and capricious as to violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment."

Furman effectively, if temporarily, halted capital punishment in the United States. Every death row inmate across the nation was resentenced to life in prison. The decision, however, did not rule the death penalty per se to be unconstitutional; rather, it struck down the laws that currently governed its application, leaving the states free to devise new ones that the Court might find acceptable. And this is exactly what happened. In the coming years, the Supreme Court would uphold an avalanche of state legislation endorsing the death penalty. Capital punishment would return stronger than ever, with many more defendants sentenced to death and eventually executed.

Oshinsky demonstrates the troubling roles played by race and class and region in capital punishment. And he concludes by considering the most recent Supreme Court death-penalty cases involving minors and the mentally ill, as well as the impact of international opinion. Compact and engaging, Oshinsky's masterful study reflects a gift for empathy, an eye for the telling anecdote and portrait, and a talent for clarifying the complex and often confusing legal issues surrounding capital punishment.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Oshinsky tells a compelling story while putting that story in its full context. His book is both a gripping account of Furman v. Georgia and a complete survey of the American experience with the death penalty over the past half century."--Stuart Banner, author of The Death Penalty: An American History

"A meticulously researched and elegantly written account by a masterful storyteller. Oshinsky uses this landmark case as a lens through which to view America's long history of state killing. . . . Filled with striking insights."-Austin Sarat, author of When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition

About the Author:

David M. Oshinsky is Distinguished Teaching Professor and holder of the Jack S. Blanton Chair in History at the University of Texas and the Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professor at New York University. His other books include Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, winner of the 1997 Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize; and A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0700617108
• ISBN 13: 9780700617104
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 158