Furman V. Georgia

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Shekinah Holemon 11-12-13 CRJ:124 Section 550 Professor Bell Furman v. Georgia In the Furman v. Georgia, the victim William Micke woke up in the middle of the night to find William Henry Furman committing robbery in his house. While escaping Furman killed the victim with one pistol shot fired through the closed kitchen door from the outside. At the trial, Furman was convicted of murder as a result of the incident and sentenced to death. Although Furman did not intend to kill the resident, the fact that he killed the resident during the committing a felony, in which made him eligible for the death penalty. Furman's lawyers appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court after the highest courts in Georgia upheld the conviction. Some issues in the case we that the Supreme Court held that Furman’s rights had been violated and that imposition and carrying out of the death penalty constitute cruel and unusual punishment in violation of Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court listed several factors, such as the obvious tendency of courts to sentence blacks to death opposed to whites. Before 1972, capital punishment was inflicted in Georgia not only for murder but also for numerous other crimes, including treason, rape, castration, feticide, arson, mutiny in a penitentiary, insurrection, and attempted insurrection. Georgia and other states that provided for capital punishment used systems that gave juries broad discretion in deciding whether to impose the death penalty on persons convicted of death-eligible offenses. The death penalty has been used to execute the retarded in Georgia and have been used to execute, or to attempt to execute juveniles. The result of the case was that the Court held that the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty in these cases constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and

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