Woodson v. North Carolina

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 much for the issues it raised as for the questions it answered. In the years that followed these death penalty cases, numerous others came before the Court, and most made reference to Woodson and the other July of 1976 cases. In Lockett v. Ohio and Bell v. Ohio the Court again considered Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment issues with regard to a state law which, in the Court'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 throughout the country.