In Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court rules by a vote of 5-4 that capital punishment, as it is currently employed on the state and federal level, is unconstitutional. The majority held that, in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, the death penalty qualified as “cruel and unusual punishment,” primarily because states employed execution in “arbitrary and capricious ways,” especially in regard to race.
It was the first time that the nation’s highest court had ruled against capital punishment. However, because the Supreme Court suggested new legislation that could make death sentences constitutional again, such as the development of standardized guidelines for juries that decide sentences, it was not an outright victory for opponents of the death penalty.
In 1976, with 66 percent of Americans still supporting capital punishment, the Supreme Court acknowledged progress made in jury guidelines and reinstated the death penalty under a “model of guided discretion.” In 1977, Gary Gilmore, a career criminal who had murdered an elderly couple because they would not lend him their car, was the first person to be executed since the end of the ban. Defiantly facing a firing squad in Utah, Gilmore’s last words to his executioners before they shot him through the heart were, “Let’s do it.”
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If they simply began executing prosecutors and all others involved in prosecutorial misconduct (hiding exculpatory evidence, lying, etc.) that resulted in death penalty or even life sentence convictions, and gave all prosecutors in non-death penalty cases doing the same, the maximum penalty the defendant might have gotten, most of the problematic issues would stop.
On the other hand, why is the STATE holding the monopoly position on “justice” when a fully competitive, private marketplace could actually do a far better job and would be far more accountable to the VICTIM (and their families) than the current system that is accountable to no one other than the political winds and the prison-industrial complex?