The Supreme Court agreed that when Georgia gave the death penalty to these three men, the state violated the Eighth Amendment. Different Supreme Court Justices said Georgia's death penalty was 'cruel and unusual' for different reasons.
Some Justices said that Georgia's use of the death penalty was "arbitrary." This meant that Georgia's courts gave the death penalty to some people and not to others, even when they committed the same crime, for no good reason.
Other Justices said Georgia's use of the death penalty was "discriminatory". They wrote that black defendants seemed more likely to get the death penalty than whites. This would violate the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that the states must give every person "the equal protection of the laws." If a certain group, like black people, is more likely to get the death penalty just because of their race, they are not being treated equally under the laws.
After "Furman", all of the states stopped using the death penalty so they could change their capital punishment laws. They wanted these new laws to make sure the death penalty would not be given in an arbitrary or discriminatory way. By early 1975, thirty states had passed new death penalty laws that they thought would satisfy the Supreme Court and let them use the death penalty in a constitutional way.
"Gregg" started out as five separate cases in five different states: "Gregg v. Georgia", "Proffitt v. Florida", "Jurek v. Texas", "Woodson v. North Carolina", and "Roberts v. Louisiana".
After the "Furman" decision, the states of Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Louisiana changed their death penalty laws to obey the Supreme Court's decision in "Furman". After this, the five defendants in these cases Troy Leon Gregg, Charles William Proffitt, Jerry Jurek, James Tyrone Woodson, and Stanislaus Roberts were each convicted of murder. Each was sentenced to death. Each defendant appealed to their state's Supreme Court. Each of the five state Supreme Courts said the death sentences were fair and legal.
Next, the defendants asked the United States Supreme Court to decide whether their death sentences were constitutional. In "Furman", the Court had ruled that the death penalty was "sometimes" cruel and unusual punishment. These five defendants were asking the Supreme Court to rule that the death penalty was "always" cruel and unusual punishment. If the Court ruled this way, it would make the death penalty unconstitutional in the entire United States. The death penalty would be illegal in every state in the country.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the cases, but they combined them all into one case. This one case is usually called "Gregg v. Georgia", because the entire name of the case is very long.
The United States Supreme Court was trying to answer a few legal questions in "Gregg". The most important were:
The Court ruled 7-2 that the death penalty is not always cruel and unusual punishment. (The two Justices who disagreed, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, had already said in "Furman" that they thought capital punishment was "always" cruel and unusual.)
The Court set out two rules that state laws have to include to make sure their death penalty sentencing laws are constitutional:
Specifically, the Court said that Georgia's, Florida's, and Texas's new death penalty laws met these requirements. This meant these laws were constitutional, and these states could go back to executing people.
The Court ruled that North Carolina's and Louisiana's new laws did not meet the requirements, because they made the death penalty mandatory (required in all cases) for some crimes. This meant these laws were still unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court's ruling in "Gregg" was important for several reasons:
Proof-of-work system
A proof-of-work (POW) system is a system where finding a solution to a given problem is difficult and/or expensive, but verifying the solution to the given problem is simple and/or cheap.
Find the positive integer whose sha256 hash value is:
To find this integer, you must compute the sha256 value for every integer starting with zero until you find the right value. While each individual computation is trivial and cheap, cumulatively the work adds up and becomes time consuming and expensive. To successfully reproduce the given hash value, you must do some work.
Find some data whose sha256 hash value begins with at least 8 leading zeros:
In the first example, the problem required the original value as proof that work had been done. In this example, it does not matter what the data is, only that it produces a hash value with the given constraints. Finding this data is difficult, but once found, it is trivial to verify by running it through sha256.
University of Barisal
University of Barisal ( also known as Barisal University or simply BU), is a public university located in Barisal, a city in southern Bangladesh. It is the only general public university in Barishal division and the country's 33rd public university. It was established in 2011 and started educational activities on 25 January 2012.
Ineffective assistance of counsel (United States)
Ineffective assistance of counsel means that a lawyer (counsel) did not help their client defend themselves during a trial. "Ineffective assistance of counsel" is a complaint that a person can make if they have been convicted of a crime, and they want to argue that their trial was not fair.
"Ineffective" means that something, or someone, did not work the way it should have. "Assistance" means "help." "Counsel" is a legal word for "lawyer." So by making a complaint of "ineffective assistance of counsel," a person is saying "my defense attorney did not help me enough."
The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution says: "the accused shall enjoy the right ... to have the assistance of counsel for his defence." When a person says they had ineffectiveness of counsel, they are saying their lawyer was so bad that they did not receive this right to a lawyer.
Unfortunately, the Sixth Amendment only said that people had the right to have a lawyer. It did not give any more details about this right. Here are some examples of things it did not say:
The Supreme Court tried to answer some of these questions in a case called "Strickland v. Washington", . In this case, the court ruled that there were two things a defendant would have to show in order to prove that they had ineffective assistance of counsel. This became known as the "Strickland test":
This second part was important. After "Stirickland", the states' appeals courts ruled that convictions were legal even in cases where the defense attorney:
There was an important reason why these cases did not qualify as "ineffective assistance of counsel." The prisoners who brought the cases to the Supreme Court could not prove the second piece of the "Strickland test." They could not prove that if they had different lawyers, their trials would have turned out differently. There was so much evidence against them, and they were so obviously guilty, that the appeals courts decided having a different lawyer would not have made any difference. No lawyer could have saved these cases, the state courts basically said.
The issue of ineffective counsel is important in the debate over capital punishment in the United States. The University of Michigan Law School keeps a list of people who have been exonerated from death row. The list counts "exonerations" as cases where "a person who has been convicted of a crime is officially cleared based on new evidence of innocence."
According to the list, between 1989 and 2015, 116 people have been exonerated from death row. Over one out of every four of these people were exonerated because an appeals court ruled they had received ineffective assistance of counsel.
Barisal Sadar Upazila
Barisal Sadar () is an Upazila of Barisal District in the Division of Barisal, Bangladesh.