d for their political beliefs. It was the political clout of these organizations that was largely responsible for bringing the Furman issue to the Supreme Court and having the decision reversed. Conservatives ran the southern courts and the issues of racial integration hadn’t had much effect on those who ran the legal system. Throughout American history most capital crimes have been tried and punished within state jurisdictions rather than at the federal level. This changed in the politically charged atmosphere of the sixties. From the early sixties to the early seventies, there were quite a few federal reviews of state court decisions. This was a watershed period in the history of capital punishment in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Robinson v. California (1962) that the Eighth Amendment was “incorporated,” meaning it applied to states. This opened the way for a significant expansion in the role of federal appeals courts in examining state capital sentencing. The practical effects of the Robinson decision were profound. First, more prisoners began contesting their death sentences in federal appellate courts, leading to a decline in executions. Only seven prisoners were executed in 1965 and only two in 1967. This was followed by an unofficial capital punishment moratorium among the states while the federal courts examined the constitutionality of various state death penalty statutes. Today the typical death row prisoner spends 10 years awaiting execution or other final disposition of the case.In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia, shook the foundations of the criminal justice system when it ruled that the death penalty, as administered, violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. This landmark case involved three different cases with black defendants. One of these defendants, William Furman, had been convicted of murder and the other two had b...
