Woodson v. North Carolina

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 position on 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 to yet another case: Roberts v. Louisiana, which the Court decided along with 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 and unusual punishment under any circumstance, and with the Court's assessment of the North Carolina statute according to its three criteria.

Justice Rehnquist offered his own dissenting opinion in which he examined the three 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 of them together, can withstand careful analysis." He found no clear proof that mandatory 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 North Carolina statute, he wrote that "In North Carolina, jurors unwilling to impose the death penalty may simply hang a jury or they may so assert themselves that a verdict of not guilty is brought in." He stated provisions in the laws of 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 should be "particularized consideration of relevant aspects of the character and record of each convicted defendant," Rehnquist was again in disagreement. "None of the cases halfheartedly cited by the plurality," he wrote, " . . . comes within 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 fullest scope of its `majestic generalities' . . . is conscripted rather than interpreted when used to permit one but not another system for imposition of the death penalty."