Eighth Amendment:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

In Woodson v. North Carolina, the Court held that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments1 prohibit mandatory imposition of the death penalty for murder.2 North Carolina had established murder as a mandatory capital offense3 soon after the Court invalidated imposition of the death penalty at the unguided discretion of the jury in Furman v. Georgia. 4

At the time of the adoption of the Eighth Amendment, the states followed the common law practice of designating death as the “exclusive and mandatory sentence” for a number of offenses.5 However, a “persistent and unswerving legislative rejection of mandatory death penalty statutes,” began soon thereafter.6 A disregard of this evidence of “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” constituted but one of three defects the Court saw in operation of the North Carolina statute.7 The second was the law’s failure to address the problem of “unguided and unchecked jury discretion.” 8 The third the failure to take into account the circumstances of the offense and a defendant’s record and character before imposing sentence.9

A State may mandate imposition of the death penalty, so long as it as long as it has “rationally narrowed the class of death-eligible defendants;” established a system of individualized sentencing based on the “defendant’s record, personal characteristics, and the circumstances of his crime” including any mitigating evidence offered by the defendant.10

Footnotes

1

U.S. Const. amdt. VIII; U.S. Const. amdt. XIV.

2

428 U.S. 280 (1976).Justice Stewart announced the judgment of the Court, joined by Justices Powell and Stevens. Justices Brennan and Marshall concurred in the judgment separately based on their view that the death penalty is per se unconstitutional.

3

Id. at 286 (quoting N,C. Gen. Stat. § 14-17 (Cum. Supp, 1975)).

4

408 U.S. 238 (1972).

5

Woodson, 428 U.S. at 289 (noting that the list of capital offenses typically included murder, treason, piracy, arson, rape, robbery, burglary, and sodomy).

6

Id. at 298; see also Winston v. United States, 172 U.S. 303, 310 (1899) (referring to the elimination of mandatory death penalty statutes in the face jurors’ reluctance to convicted); Williams v. New York, 337 U.S. 241, 247 (1949) ( “This whole country has traveled far from the period in which the death sentence was an automatic . . . result of conviction.” ); McGautha v. California, 402 U.S. 183, 198 (1971) (commenting on the “rebellion against the common law-rule imposing a mandatory death sentence on all convicted murderers” ).

7

Woodson, 428 U.S. at 301.

8

Id. at 302.

9

Id. at 303-04.

10

Kansas v. Marsh, 538 U.S. 631 (2006) (concluding that a Kansas death penalty statute, that required imposition of capital punishment if the jury failed to find that the mitigating factors outweighed the aggravating factors, did not violate the Eighth Amendment; see also Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S. 639 (1990), overruled on other grounds, Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002).