Petitioner
James Tyrone Woodson, et al.
Respondent
State of North Carolina
Petitioner's Claim
That a North Carolina law establishing a mandatory death sentence for all convicted first-degree murderers constituted a violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
Chief Lawyer for Petitioner
Anthony G. Anderson
Chief Lawyer for Respondent
Sidney S. Eagles, Jr.
Justices for the Court
William J. Brennan, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., John Paul Stevens, Potter Stewart (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
Harry A. Blackmun, Warren E. Burger, William H. Rehnquist, Byron R. White
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
2 July 1976
Decision
That the North Carolina law was unconstitutional because it failed to take into account the "fundamental respect for humanity" inherent in the Eighth Amendment's requirement that punishment be "exercised within the limits of civilized standards."
Significance
Woodson v. North Carolina tested the Court's resolve with regard to its 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling when it found that a Georgia death penalty law amounted to cruel and unusual punishment as proscribed by the EighthAmendment. Woodson was one of the five "Death Penalty Cases" of 1976,along with Gregg v. Georgia, Jurek v. Texas, Proffitt v. Florida, and Roberts v. Louisiana, the latter decided on the same day as Woodson. The first three affirmed state death penalties, whereasWoodson and Roberts struck down mandatory death sentences. Rather that settling death penalty issues for all time, however, these cases raised questions which continued to be debated with increasing passion over subsequent decades.
Woodson's Crime, Carolina's Punishment
According to court testimony, the events involving James Tyrone Woodson and three others on 3 June 1974 took place as follows. Woodson had been drinking heavily when at 9:30 p.m. Luby Waxton and Leonard Tucker arrived at his trailer. Woodson went out to meet him, at which time a belligerent Waxton struck him on the face and threatened to kill him if he did not join the other two ina robbery. Woodson got in the car with them, and they drove to Waxton's trailer, where they were met by Johnnie Lee Carroll. Waxton got his nickel-platedderringer, and Tucker gave Woodson a rifle; then the four men drove to a convenience store in a single vehicle.
Upon arrival, Tucker and Waxton entered the store while Carroll and Woodson remained in the car as lookouts. Inside the store, Tucker bought a pack of cigarettes, then Waxton approached the clerk and also asked for a pack; but whenshe went to give them to him, he withdrew his derringer from his hip pocketand shot her at point-blank range. Waxton removed the money from the cash register and gave it to Tucker, who rushed past an entering customer to the parking lot. From outside, Tucker heard a shot, and moments later Waxton appearing holding a wad of paper money. The four men drove away.
As it later turned out, the customer had been wounded seriously, but the cashier was dead, making this a first-degree murder case. At the trial, Tucker and Carroll testified for the prosecution in return for lesser sentences. Waxton, who claimed that Tucker, and not himself, had shot the cashier and the customer, also tried to get a reduced sentence. Woodson, on the other hand, heldthat he had been coerced by Waxton into riding in the car to the store thatnight, and therefore he refused to plead guilty to any offense. Both Woodsonand Waxton were found guilty and, according to a recently adopted North Carolina law that made a death sentence mandatory in first-degree murder cases, were sentenced to death.
When the case came before the Supreme Court, the human-rights organization Amnesty International filed an amicus curiae brief on behalf of Woodsonand Waxton. Solicitor General Robert Bork filed an amicus curiae brieffor the United States on behalf of the respondents.
"A Faceless, Undifferentiated Mass"
The Court concluded that North Carolina's mandatory death sentence violated not only the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the less often cited Eighth Amendment, which states in full: "Excessive bail shall not berequired, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." In a joint opinion delivered by Justice Stewart, a plurality composedof Justices Powell, Stevens, and Stewart held that the Eighth Amendment "serves to assure that the State's power to punish is `exercised within the limits of civilized standards,'" a stipulation established in Trop v. Dulles (1958).
By three criteria, the North Carolina law--which had been adopted only two years before, in 1974--was found wanting. The first of these was the criterionof "contemporary standards," from which the law "depart[ed] markedly." Thoughat the time of the Eighth Amendment's adoption all states provided mandatorydeath sentences for certain offenses, the Court held that the Amendment should be viewed in light of changing standards regarding cruel and unusual punishment.
This did not mean, however, that the Court was opposed to the death penalty per se. One of the first issues addressed in Woodson, as a matter of fact, was the question of whether the death penalty "under any circumstances is cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments." Citing statements made in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court rejected this argument. The issue considered in Woodson was purely thatof the mandatory death penalty, and in handing down its opinion, the Court offered a short history of mandatory death penalty statutes in the United States.
Although mandatory statutes existed from the nation's beginnings, "Almost from the outset jurors reacted unfavorably to the harshness of mandatory death sentences." This led to reforms, the most notable of which was a 1794 Pennsylvania statute which limited mandatory death sentences to "murder of the firstdegree," which it defined as "willful, deliberate and premeditated" killing.This idea of dividing murders into degrees, and of punishing accordingly, caught on. But starting with Tennessee in 1838, a new type of reform emerged: jury discretion in sentencing. By 1963, all jurisdictions in America had some form of discretionary jury sentencing in place of automatic death sentences.
Hence "the reaction of jurors and legislators to the harshness of those provisions [in the Amendment] has led to the replacement of automatic death penalty statutes with discretionary jury sentencing." The North Carolina statute, by contrast, seemed tied more to an attempt by that state to "retain the deathpenalty in a form consistent with the Constitution" than it did with "a renewed societal acceptance of mandatory death sentencing." Hence the statute, the Court ruled, "is a constitutionally impermissible departure from contemporary standards respecting imposition of the unique and irretrievable punishmentof death."
The second criterion involved standards again, but in this case the standardstested were those by which a jury exercised "the power to decide which first-degree murderers shall live and which shall die." Much of Woodson referred back to the Court's 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia. The earlier case had involved a burglary defendant who, while attempting to flee afterbeing discovered by a person whose house he was robbing, tripped and fell andthus caused his gun to go off, killing a resident of the house. He receivedthe death penalty, and challenged this before the Court, holding that the imposition of a death sentence under such circumstances constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In oneof its longer rulings--some 200 pages of opinions--the Court held that the death penalty was indeed cruel and unusual as applied to Furman and tothe petitioners in Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas.
As a result of Furman, state legislatures had reconsidered their deathpenalty provisions to ensure fairness in the disposition of death sentences,and North Carolina was among those states. However, in the Court's view, theresulting North Carolina statute "fails to provide a constitutionally tolerable response to Furman's rejection of unbridled jury discretion in theimposition of capital sentences." A central aspect of the Court's ruling inFurman had been its "conviction that vesting a jury with standardlesssentencing power violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments." However, North Carolina's solution to the problem of "standardless sentencing power" wasin the Court's view no solution: instead of allowing juries too much sentencing power, it had removed all of their power by enforcing a mandatory death sentence, thus achieving the exact opposite result of that desired by the majority in Furman.
The third criterion related to a jury's ability to evaluate the character ofan individual defendant before it voted for the ultimate sentence. Again, theNorth Carolina law failed to take account of an ever-important concept in human affairs: gradations of good and evil. In theory, the state law would apply the same treatment to a serial killer as to a defendant who accidentally shot someone while committing a robbery to obtain food for his family. Whereas
Concurrence and Dissent Intertwined with Other Cases
Toward the end of its opinion, the Court had noted that "Death, in its finality, differs more from life imprisonment than a 100-year prison term [differs]from one of only a year or two." On this count, at least, all nine members of the Court would most likely have been in agreement. But to Justice Marshall, the death penalty under any circumstance was cruel and unusual punishment; hence he concurred with the Court's opinion while noting his positionon the larger subject. Marshall made reference to his dissenting opinion in Gregg v. Georgia, issued earlier that day (p. 231); likewise Brennan referred to his own dissent in that case (p. 227) and stated that for reasons he had given there, he concurred with the Court's judgment in the present one.
Likewise Justice Blackmun, one of the four dissenters in Woodson, cited his own earlier dissent, as well as the dissenting opinions with which he joined, in an earlier case: Furman v. Georgia (pp. 375, 414, 465). Justice White, joined by Chief Justice Burger and Justice Rehnquist, referred toyet another case: Roberts v. Louisiana, which the Court decided alongwith Woodson, Gregg, and other capital cases on that day, 2 July 1976. Citing his opinion on page 325 of that case, White stated that he disagreed both with the petitioner's claim that the death penalty was cruel andunusual punishment under any circumstance, and with the Court's assessment ofthe North Carolina statute according to its three criteria.
Justice Rehnquist offered his own dissenting opinion in which he examined thethree criteria used by the plurality in establishing the Court's decision. "I do not believe," he wrote, "that any one of these reasons singly, or all ofthem together, can withstand careful analysis." He found no clear proof thatmandatory sentencing was necessarily and always more harsh than discretionary, or that society as a whole was as opposed to the idea of mandatory sentencing as the Court held. As for the second flaw noted by the Court in the NorthCarolina statute, he wrote that "In North Carolina, jurors unwilling to impose the death penalty may simply hang a jury or they may so assert themselvesthat a verdict of not guilty is brought in." He stated provisions in the lawsof other southern states, including Georgia, Florida, and Texas, whereby juries have considerable leeway in sentencing, but stated that "it seems to me impossible to conclude . . . that a mandatory death sentence statute such as North Carolina enacted is any less sound constitutionally than the systems enacted by Georgia, Florida, and Texas which the Court upholds." As for the plurality's assertion that before the death penalty could be imposed there shouldbe "particularized consideration of relevant aspects of the character and record of each convicted defendant," Rehnquist was again in disagreement. "Noneof the cases halfheartedly cited by the plurality," he wrote, " . . . comeswithin a light-year of establishing the proposition that individualized consideration is a constitutional requisite for the imposition of a death penalty." In conclusion, he stated that the Fourteenth Amendment, "given the fullestscope of its `majestic generalities' . . . is conscripted rather than interpreted when used to permit one but not another system for imposition of the death penalty."
Impact
Woodson, along with the other capital cases decided on 2 July 1976, just 48 hours before the nation's Bicentennial, was important at least as muchfor the issues it raised as for the questions it answered. In the years thatfollowed these death penalty cases, numerous others came before the Court, and most made reference to Woodson and the other July of 1976 cases. InLockett v. Ohio and Bell v. Ohio the Court again considered Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment issues with regard to a state law which, in theCourt's opinion, failed to take into account mitigating factors in sentencing. As to whether a person involved in a crime that includes murder can be sentenced to death along with the actual perpetrator, as Woodson had been, that question was examined in Enmund v. Florida (1982) and Tison v. Arizona (1987). In the first case, the answer was "no"; in the second "yes". This serves to illustrate the complexity of the death-penalty issue, which continues to be debated in the Supreme Court and in many lower courts throughoutthe country.
Related Cases
Attitudes Toward the Death Penalty for Murderers
According to Gallup polls taken periodically during the years between 1953 and 1995, the percentage of Americans favoring the death penalty for persons convicted of murder was at its lowest in 1966 (42 percent), and its highest in1994 (80 percent).
The College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University found that in1996, more than 73 percent of Americans favored the death penalty. Of males,almost 82 percent answered in the affirmative when asked "Are you in favor of the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?"; of females, 65.6 percent.
Several interesting facts emerged from the Sam Houston State materials. The percentage in favor was more or less constant among age groups, varying from 70.4 percent for 18-to-24-year-olds to 77 percent for 40-to-59-year-olds. Thelowest education bracket, those who had not finished high school, was as likely to answer in the affirmative as the highest, college graduates. Both wereat 67.2 percent, with the highest percentage (80.5 percent) for people who had graduated high school but not attended college. The study, which divided respondents into demographic groups on a variety of lines, revealed that the lowest group support for the death penalty came from African Americans, of whomonly 58.6 were in favor.
Sources
Bureau of Justice Statistics Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics--1996 Washington, DC: U.S. Government, 1997.
James Tyrone Woodson, et al.
Respondent
State of North Carolina
Petitioner's Claim
That a North Carolina law establishing a mandatory death sentence for all convicted first-degree murderers constituted a violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
Chief Lawyer for Petitioner
Anthony G. Anderson
Chief Lawyer for Respondent
Sidney S. Eagles, Jr.
Justices for the Court
William J. Brennan, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., John Paul Stevens, Potter Stewart (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
Harry A. Blackmun, Warren E. Burger, William H. Rehnquist, Byron R. White
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
2 July 1976
Decision
That the North Carolina law was unconstitutional because it failed to take into account the "fundamental respect for humanity" inherent in the Eighth Amendment's requirement that punishment be "exercised within the limits of civilized standards."
Significance
Woodson v. North Carolina tested the Court's resolve with regard to its 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling when it found that a Georgia death penalty law amounted to cruel and unusual punishment as proscribed by the EighthAmendment. Woodson was one of the five "Death Penalty Cases" of 1976,along with Gregg v. Georgia, Jurek v. Texas, Proffitt v. Florida, and Roberts v. Louisiana, the latter decided on the same day as Woodson. The first three affirmed state death penalties, whereasWoodson and Roberts struck down mandatory death sentences. Rather that settling death penalty issues for all time, however, these cases raised questions which continued to be debated with increasing passion over subsequent decades.
Woodson's Crime, Carolina's Punishment
According to court testimony, the events involving James Tyrone Woodson and three others on 3 June 1974 took place as follows. Woodson had been drinking heavily when at 9:30 p.m. Luby Waxton and Leonard Tucker arrived at his trailer. Woodson went out to meet him, at which time a belligerent Waxton struck him on the face and threatened to kill him if he did not join the other two ina robbery. Woodson got in the car with them, and they drove to Waxton's trailer, where they were met by Johnnie Lee Carroll. Waxton got his nickel-platedderringer, and Tucker gave Woodson a rifle; then the four men drove to a convenience store in a single vehicle.
Upon arrival, Tucker and Waxton entered the store while Carroll and Woodson remained in the car as lookouts. Inside the store, Tucker bought a pack of cigarettes, then Waxton approached the clerk and also asked for a pack; but whenshe went to give them to him, he withdrew his derringer from his hip pocketand shot her at point-blank range. Waxton removed the money from the cash register and gave it to Tucker, who rushed past an entering customer to the parking lot. From outside, Tucker heard a shot, and moments later Waxton appearing holding a wad of paper money. The four men drove away.
As it later turned out, the customer had been wounded seriously, but the cashier was dead, making this a first-degree murder case. At the trial, Tucker and Carroll testified for the prosecution in return for lesser sentences. Waxton, who claimed that Tucker, and not himself, had shot the cashier and the customer, also tried to get a reduced sentence. Woodson, on the other hand, heldthat he had been coerced by Waxton into riding in the car to the store thatnight, and therefore he refused to plead guilty to any offense. Both Woodsonand Waxton were found guilty and, according to a recently adopted North Carolina law that made a death sentence mandatory in first-degree murder cases, were sentenced to death.
When the case came before the Supreme Court, the human-rights organization Amnesty International filed an amicus curiae brief on behalf of Woodsonand Waxton. Solicitor General Robert Bork filed an amicus curiae brieffor the United States on behalf of the respondents.
"A Faceless, Undifferentiated Mass"
The Court concluded that North Carolina's mandatory death sentence violated not only the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the less often cited Eighth Amendment, which states in full: "Excessive bail shall not berequired, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." In a joint opinion delivered by Justice Stewart, a plurality composedof Justices Powell, Stevens, and Stewart held that the Eighth Amendment "serves to assure that the State's power to punish is `exercised within the limits of civilized standards,'" a stipulation established in Trop v. Dulles (1958).
By three criteria, the North Carolina law--which had been adopted only two years before, in 1974--was found wanting. The first of these was the criterionof "contemporary standards," from which the law "depart[ed] markedly." Thoughat the time of the Eighth Amendment's adoption all states provided mandatorydeath sentences for certain offenses, the Court held that the Amendment should be viewed in light of changing standards regarding cruel and unusual punishment.
This did not mean, however, that the Court was opposed to the death penalty per se. One of the first issues addressed in Woodson, as a matter of fact, was the question of whether the death penalty "under any circumstances is cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments." Citing statements made in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court rejected this argument. The issue considered in Woodson was purely thatof the mandatory death penalty, and in handing down its opinion, the Court offered a short history of mandatory death penalty statutes in the United States.
Although mandatory statutes existed from the nation's beginnings, "Almost from the outset jurors reacted unfavorably to the harshness of mandatory death sentences." This led to reforms, the most notable of which was a 1794 Pennsylvania statute which limited mandatory death sentences to "murder of the firstdegree," which it defined as "willful, deliberate and premeditated" killing.This idea of dividing murders into degrees, and of punishing accordingly, caught on. But starting with Tennessee in 1838, a new type of reform emerged: jury discretion in sentencing. By 1963, all jurisdictions in America had some form of discretionary jury sentencing in place of automatic death sentences.
Hence "the reaction of jurors and legislators to the harshness of those provisions [in the Amendment] has led to the replacement of automatic death penalty statutes with discretionary jury sentencing." The North Carolina statute, by contrast, seemed tied more to an attempt by that state to "retain the deathpenalty in a form consistent with the Constitution" than it did with "a renewed societal acceptance of mandatory death sentencing." Hence the statute, the Court ruled, "is a constitutionally impermissible departure from contemporary standards respecting imposition of the unique and irretrievable punishmentof death."
The second criterion involved standards again, but in this case the standardstested were those by which a jury exercised "the power to decide which first-degree murderers shall live and which shall die." Much of Woodson referred back to the Court's 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia. The earlier case had involved a burglary defendant who, while attempting to flee afterbeing discovered by a person whose house he was robbing, tripped and fell andthus caused his gun to go off, killing a resident of the house. He receivedthe death penalty, and challenged this before the Court, holding that the imposition of a death sentence under such circumstances constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In oneof its longer rulings--some 200 pages of opinions--the Court held that the death penalty was indeed cruel and unusual as applied to Furman and tothe petitioners in Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas.
As a result of Furman, state legislatures had reconsidered their deathpenalty provisions to ensure fairness in the disposition of death sentences,and North Carolina was among those states. However, in the Court's view, theresulting North Carolina statute "fails to provide a constitutionally tolerable response to Furman's rejection of unbridled jury discretion in theimposition of capital sentences." A central aspect of the Court's ruling inFurman had been its "conviction that vesting a jury with standardlesssentencing power violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments." However, North Carolina's solution to the problem of "standardless sentencing power" wasin the Court's view no solution: instead of allowing juries too much sentencing power, it had removed all of their power by enforcing a mandatory death sentence, thus achieving the exact opposite result of that desired by the majority in Furman.
The third criterion related to a jury's ability to evaluate the character ofan individual defendant before it voted for the ultimate sentence. Again, theNorth Carolina law failed to take account of an ever-important concept in human affairs: gradations of good and evil. In theory, the state law would apply the same treatment to a serial killer as to a defendant who accidentally shot someone while committing a robbery to obtain food for his family. Whereas
The respect for human dignity underlying the Eighth Amendment . .. requires consideration of aspects of the character of the individual offender . . . The North Carolina statute impermissibly treats all persons convicted of a designated offense not as uniquely individual human beings, but as members of a faceless, undifferentiated mass to be subjected to blind infliction of the death penalty.Thus by these three criteria, the Courtheld the North Carolina statute unconstitutional.
Concurrence and Dissent Intertwined with Other Cases
Toward the end of its opinion, the Court had noted that "Death, in its finality, differs more from life imprisonment than a 100-year prison term [differs]from one of only a year or two." On this count, at least, all nine members of the Court would most likely have been in agreement. But to Justice Marshall, the death penalty under any circumstance was cruel and unusual punishment; hence he concurred with the Court's opinion while noting his positionon the larger subject. Marshall made reference to his dissenting opinion in Gregg v. Georgia, issued earlier that day (p. 231); likewise Brennan referred to his own dissent in that case (p. 227) and stated that for reasons he had given there, he concurred with the Court's judgment in the present one.
Likewise Justice Blackmun, one of the four dissenters in Woodson, cited his own earlier dissent, as well as the dissenting opinions with which he joined, in an earlier case: Furman v. Georgia (pp. 375, 414, 465). Justice White, joined by Chief Justice Burger and Justice Rehnquist, referred toyet another case: Roberts v. Louisiana, which the Court decided alongwith Woodson, Gregg, and other capital cases on that day, 2 July 1976. Citing his opinion on page 325 of that case, White stated that he disagreed both with the petitioner's claim that the death penalty was cruel andunusual punishment under any circumstance, and with the Court's assessment ofthe North Carolina statute according to its three criteria.
Justice Rehnquist offered his own dissenting opinion in which he examined thethree criteria used by the plurality in establishing the Court's decision. "I do not believe," he wrote, "that any one of these reasons singly, or all ofthem together, can withstand careful analysis." He found no clear proof thatmandatory sentencing was necessarily and always more harsh than discretionary, or that society as a whole was as opposed to the idea of mandatory sentencing as the Court held. As for the second flaw noted by the Court in the NorthCarolina statute, he wrote that "In North Carolina, jurors unwilling to impose the death penalty may simply hang a jury or they may so assert themselvesthat a verdict of not guilty is brought in." He stated provisions in the lawsof other southern states, including Georgia, Florida, and Texas, whereby juries have considerable leeway in sentencing, but stated that "it seems to me impossible to conclude . . . that a mandatory death sentence statute such as North Carolina enacted is any less sound constitutionally than the systems enacted by Georgia, Florida, and Texas which the Court upholds." As for the plurality's assertion that before the death penalty could be imposed there shouldbe "particularized consideration of relevant aspects of the character and record of each convicted defendant," Rehnquist was again in disagreement. "Noneof the cases halfheartedly cited by the plurality," he wrote, " . . . comeswithin a light-year of establishing the proposition that individualized consideration is a constitutional requisite for the imposition of a death penalty." In conclusion, he stated that the Fourteenth Amendment, "given the fullestscope of its `majestic generalities' . . . is conscripted rather than interpreted when used to permit one but not another system for imposition of the death penalty."
Impact
Woodson, along with the other capital cases decided on 2 July 1976, just 48 hours before the nation's Bicentennial, was important at least as muchfor the issues it raised as for the questions it answered. In the years thatfollowed these death penalty cases, numerous others came before the Court, and most made reference to Woodson and the other July of 1976 cases. InLockett v. Ohio and Bell v. Ohio the Court again considered Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment issues with regard to a state law which, in theCourt's opinion, failed to take into account mitigating factors in sentencing. As to whether a person involved in a crime that includes murder can be sentenced to death along with the actual perpetrator, as Woodson had been, that question was examined in Enmund v. Florida (1982) and Tison v. Arizona (1987). In the first case, the answer was "no"; in the second "yes". This serves to illustrate the complexity of the death-penalty issue, which continues to be debated in the Supreme Court and in many lower courts throughoutthe country.
Related Cases
- Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958).
- Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).
- Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976).
- Proffitt v. Florida, 428 U.S. 242 (1976).
- Jurek v. Texas, 428 U.S. 262 (1976).
- Roberts v. Louisiana, 431 U.S. 633 (1977).
- Lockett v. Ohio, 438 U.S. 586 (1978).
- Bell v. Ohio, 438 U.S. 637 (1978).
- Butler v. South Carolina, 459 U.S. 932 (1982).
- Boyd v. North Carolina, 471 U.S. 1030 (1985).
- Darden v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 168 (1986).
Attitudes Toward the Death Penalty for Murderers
According to Gallup polls taken periodically during the years between 1953 and 1995, the percentage of Americans favoring the death penalty for persons convicted of murder was at its lowest in 1966 (42 percent), and its highest in1994 (80 percent).
The College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University found that in1996, more than 73 percent of Americans favored the death penalty. Of males,almost 82 percent answered in the affirmative when asked "Are you in favor of the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?"; of females, 65.6 percent.
Several interesting facts emerged from the Sam Houston State materials. The percentage in favor was more or less constant among age groups, varying from 70.4 percent for 18-to-24-year-olds to 77 percent for 40-to-59-year-olds. Thelowest education bracket, those who had not finished high school, was as likely to answer in the affirmative as the highest, college graduates. Both wereat 67.2 percent, with the highest percentage (80.5 percent) for people who had graduated high school but not attended college. The study, which divided respondents into demographic groups on a variety of lines, revealed that the lowest group support for the death penalty came from African Americans, of whomonly 58.6 were in favor.
Sources
Bureau of Justice Statistics Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics--1996 Washington, DC: U.S. Government, 1997.
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