Lockett v. Ohio - Deciding Who Shall Die

In considering Lockett v. Ohio, the Court kept in mind a previous landmark death penalty case, Furman v. Georgia (1972). In that case, the Court expressed its dismay at the inconsistency of death penalty sentencing, pointing out that without clear statutory guidelines as to when the death penalty should be administered, courts were prone to discriminate against minority defendants.

As a result, many states enacted mandatory death penalty statutes, laying out the types of cases in which judges were legally required to offer the death penalty. Other states, including Ohio, enacted statutes that listed the factors that a judge might consider in deciding whether or not to offer the death penalty. Indeed, the Ohio state legislature had been in the process of writing a new death penalty statute when Furman came down, and legislators revised their new law to conform to the new decision.

Now the Court was viewing another situation with dismay: restrictive laws that kept judges from taking all mitigating circumstances into account when they administered the severest penalty of all. The Court had already struck down several mandatory death penalty statutes. In Lockett, it would go one step further: it would require that judges who were administering the death penalty should hear evidence on any mitigating circumstance that the defense wished to present.