Carol Steiker
speaker
64 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Carol Steiker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So, Furman v. Georgia, 1972. The death penalty in the United States is, at one stroke of a pen, abolished across all 40 states that had it and the federal government.
The grounds for the decision were really hard to say.
Because there are nine people on the Supreme Court and every single one of them wrote his own opinion in this case. So there are nine different opinions in Furman v. Georgia. Wow. That's not, that's not. That does not happen. No, that does not happen.
It's a 5-4 decision, very slim majority. So there are five majority opinions and four dissents. None of the people in the majority join anyone else's majority opinion. Some of the dissenters join in each other's dissents, but there's nine of them. And they all have something a little bit different to say.
He has a line that I think is really powerful where he says, when you have this like broad authorization and no standards to sentencing juries, a system like that is pregnant with discrimination. It's pregnant with discrimination. It will give birth to discrimination because it will give people's biases, you know, play in the decision making process.
And they basically said, the problem is not... that Europe is getting rid of the death penalty and that it's per se unconstitutional. Instead, Stuart and White said it's the way that it's being applied with this broad authorization and no instructions. The most famous line is Justice Stuart's line. He said, these death sentences in these cases...
are cruel and unusual, the way being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual. There's just no rhyme or reason about who gets the death penalty. And, you know, we would say it's like totally rando is what we would say today. What he said is it's wanton and freakish, the application of the death penalty. Wanton and freakish, struck by lightning.
Exactly.
Yeah, well, what happened was I think the justices miscalculated where standards of decency had evolved to because there was – a tremendous backlash to Furman. Someone stood up in the Georgia legislature and introduces a new death penalty scheme that attempts to guide juror discretion. And between 1972 and 1976, 35 states and the federal government
pass new death penalty statutes attempting to give the guidance that Stewart and White said was lacking in Furman so that they could keep the death penalty. And they start sentencing people to death.
Charles Manson got off of death row. Sirhan Sirhan, who had just shot Bobby Kennedy, you know, he got off of death row. So people were kind of outraged. Like, Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan are not going to get executed? No.
in California with like almost instantaneously, you know, California has all of these initiatives and referendums and the people passed by initiative, they amended the California constitution to allow the death penalty. So you might've thought, doesn't California still have the death penalty? Yes, it does. But how do they do that?
If the California constitution says you can't have it because the people instantaneously amended the constitution and, after the California Supreme Court abolished it constitutionally.
There's no way the court can ignore that. It has to decide whether these new statutes are OK or not.
They don't wait very long.
Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida. What's interesting is there's two buckets of kinds of statutes. Like it upholds three of these new statutes, the ones from Georgia, Florida, and Texas, because it says that they do guidance. They guide the jury. They give the jury something to think about other than, you know, according to your conscience.
So they say, okay, those statutes are okay.
In 76, the Supreme Court said, yeah, no, you can't have mandatory statutes. One is, they said, it's not really going to take care of the problem of discretion because... Juries, if they don't want the person to get the death penalty, they'll just find them guilty of second degree murder. You know, that's always open to them.
So it's just going to drive the discretion underground rather than getting rid of it.
This is very poetic. It says it treats them as members of an undifferentiated mass subject to the blind infliction of capital punishment. And it doesn't give any consideration to the diverse frailties of humankind. I love that. Wow. Diverse frailties of humankind.
Showing 41–60 of 64 · page 3 of 4
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