Woodson v. North Carolina

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 be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." In a joint opinion delivered by Justice Stewart, a plurality composed of 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 criterion of "contemporary standards," from which the law "depart[ed] markedly." Though at the time of the Eighth Amendment's adoption all states provided mandatory death 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 that of 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 first degree," 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 death penalty 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 punishment of death."

The second criterion involved standards again, but in this case the standards tested 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 after being discovered by a person whose house he was robbing, tripped and fell and thus caused his gun to go off, killing a resident of the house. He received the 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 one of 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 to the petitioners in Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas.

As a result of Furman, state legislatures had reconsidered their death penalty provisions to ensure fairness in the disposition of death sentences, and North Carolina was among those states. However, in the Court's view, the resulting North Carolina statute "fails to provide a constitutionally tolerable response to Furman's rejection of unbridled jury discretion in the imposition of capital sentences." A central aspect of the Court's ruling in Furman had been its "conviction that vesting a jury with standardless sentencing power violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments." However, North Carolina's solution to the problem of "standardless sentencing power" was in 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 of an individual defendant before it voted for the ultimate sentence. Again, the North 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 Court held the North Carolina statute unconstitutional.