ABSTRACT
In McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 US 279, the US Supreme Court rejected a challenge to capital punishment rooted in statistical findings of racial bias in sentencing. The equal protection argument had been unsuccessful when presented by earlier advocates of abolishing the death penalty, but McCleskey's counsel had reason to believe that it would fare better by the mid- 1980s because new research substantiated claims that race played a significant role in Georgia's capital sentencing. When it agreed to hear McCleskey, the Supreme Court was embroiled in conflict over capital punishment. McCleskey represented a crucial setback for anti-death-penalty activists. Had the Court relied on the Baldus study in overturning McCleskey's death sentence, it would have acknowledged that capital sentencing was administered arbitrarily in Georgia, contrary to the Court's dictates in Furman v. Georgia, 408 US 238. The constitutionality of capital punishment would then have been called into question whenever statistical evidence of racial discrimination in capital sentencing could be demonstrated.
