ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1978 Warren McCleskey was convicted of armed robbery and murder in the Superior Court of Fulton County, Georgia. The convictions arose out of a furniture store robbery that McCleskey, an African American man, admitted having participated in and the contemporaneous shooting of a white police officer. McCleskey denied that he had shot the officer, but he later was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. McCleskey appealed his conviction and sentence, contending that the Georgia capital sentencing process was administered in a racially discriminatory manner in violation of his rights under both the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. Specifically, McCleskey came forward with statistical evidence demonstrating that race played a critical role in who was sentenced to death in Georgia. The report, a detailed study by Professor David Baldus, showed that African Americans were significantly more likely to receive a death sentence in
Georgia than white defendants, and that African Americans who killed whites likewise were more likely to be sentenced to death than were whites who killed African Americans. Despite this evidence – evidence that the Court assumed to be valid – in a 5-4 decision, the Court rejected both of McCleskey’s constitutional claims. As to his equal protection claim, the Court ruled that the statistical evidence offered by McCleskey failed to prove that his own conviction and sentence were the result of racial prejudice. As to his claim under the Eight Amendment, the Court concluded that the procedural safeguards governing Georgia’s sentencing procedures eliminated any “constitutionally significant” risk that McCleskey’s death sentence was indiscriminately imposed. In rejecting McCleskey’s constitutional challenges, the Court improperly turned a blind eye to what was clear evidence of racial discrimination and sanctioned a failed legislative attempt to ensure fairness in capital sentencing. The Court’s ruling in McCleskey effectively ended any meaningful challenges to the death penalty in the United States.
