See the article in its original context from. His landmark case captured the attention of notable figures such as Nelson Mandela and Coretta Scott King, both of whom petitioned for McCleskey’s clemency.Â. Death is different, the Court recognized, irretrievable even when the state makes mistakes. Mr. McCleskey, a black, 44-year old factory worker who was convicted of killing a white police officer here during an attempted robbery in 1978, was electrocuted at … On September 25, 1991, Warren McCleskey, an African American death-row inmate whose case twice made U.S. Supreme Court history, was executed in a Georgia-state electric chair.

The action drew immediate support from several of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, and Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris have promised that, if elected, they would suspend executions at the federal level for similar reasons. State legislatures have passed racial-justice acts in Kentucky and North Carolina (North Carolina’s has since been repealed), and have abolished the death penalty outright in Illinois, Maryland, and New Hampshire, citing racial discrimination as a motivation. All four holdup men were legally responsible for the killing no matter who pulled the trigger, but Mr. McCleskey was the only one executed -- on evidence that was illegally obtained, incomplete and questionable. He was a robber, part of a gang that shot and killed an off-duty police officer during a holdup.

The McCleskey opinion has had far-reaching effects on all kinds of equal-protection claims. Compounding the biases that pervade the entire criminal-justice system, including in jury selection, states are more likely to seek and secure a death sentence in cases involving white victims, especially if the defendant is black. Such a decision would have provided a powerful precedent for contesting the death penalty at the national level—and the racial biases of the country’s broader criminal-justice system. Gorsuch will soon have an opportunity to share his own in-depth thoughts on the alleged racial discrimination in Flowers when the Court delivers its opinion. This article is part of our project “The Presence of Justice,” which is supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge.

She said the compounding evidence of discrimination and the failures to mitigate it have also prompted renewed litigation against capital punishment.

In the decades since the case was decided, legislators and state courts have sought to address the systemic racial disparities that McCleskey acknowledged but did nothing to correct. Curtis Flowers has faced six separate trials for a 1996 quadruple murder. All Rights Reserved. Set against the brazen misconduct of our contemporary legal system, the story explores the relationship between two disparate men, the undying quest for justice and the improbable ways in which we discover hope.Â, Warren McCleskey in Jackson, Ga., on September 20, 1991, five days before his execution. In a memo to his fellow justices, Antonin Scalia wrote that racial biases have a “real” and “ineradicable” influence on “jury decisions and (hence) prosecutorial decisions”—and yet he didn’t believe that bias was enough to invalidate those decisions. Releasing People From Prison Is Easier Said Than Done, Someday McCleskey Will Be Death Penalty’s Dred Scott, a 2016 case that overturned a capital sentence, suggested he was sympathetic to Flowers’s case.

Beginning in 1988 with the introduction of the Racial Justice Act, which would have prohibited “the imposition or the carrying out of the death penalty in a racially disproportionate pattern,” Congress has proposed more than a dozen laws to counteract the ruling. A findin… The record of systemic disparities in U.S. capital cases is long and well documented. They based their allegations of unconstitutional discrimination on a landmark statistical study showing significant racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty in Georgia. Lawyers for Warren McCleskey, a black man sentenced to death in Georgia for killing a white police officer during an armed robbery, argued on appeal that capital punishment in the state was racially discriminatory and violated McCleskey’s Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection. In 1987, the Supreme Court came within one vote of eliminating capital punishment in Georgia based on evidence of racial disparities.

A series of decisions from earlier this year suggest that the Court’s new conservative majority may in general be supportive of capital punishment—but the alleged discrimination in Flowers’s trials elicited concern even from some of the conservative justices.

Some supporters of the death penalty are outraged that Mr. McCleskey lived so long, surviving through the ingenuity of writ-writing lawyers. It created a crippling burden of proof for anyone seeking to stamp out the corrosive influence of race in the criminal justice system. The Court has “never revisited its shameful holding” in McCleskey, Stubbs has written. In an eloquent dissent, Justice William Brennan cited the Supreme Court’s past decisions barring black citizenship in Dred Scott v. Sandford and protecting segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, warning that the McCleskey ruling would have broad implications in the fight for racial equality. But this January, the justices declined to hear arguments in either case. After empirical evidence of systemic bias was first published decades ago, it was almost used to strike a major blow to the criminal-justice system, in the 1987 Supreme Court case McCleskey v… Three of the Court’s conservative members have already joined their liberal peers in voicing unease about discrimination in individual capital cases: John Roberts condemned the use of racist arguments in court when writing for the majority in a 2016 case that overturned a capital sentence, and during arguments in Flowers v. Mississippi, Samuel Alito said that “the history of the case prior to this trial is very troubling” and “is cause for concern.” Kavanaugh directed a series of pointed questions toward the Mississippi attorney general that suggested he was sympathetic to Flowers’s case. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom issued the latest such order in March, arguing that the death-penalty system is inherently unfair and disproportionately targets people of color and those with disabilities. McCleskey was African American; his victim was white Atlanta Police Officer Frank Schlatt. In the past, such statements would have likely generated backlash from the national electorate. Warren McCleskey's lawyers proved, in his first trip to the Supreme Court, that Georgia courts condemned blacks who killed whites four times as often as when the victim was black. Justice Lewis Powell, writing on behalf of the majority, even noted that the arguments in the case “basically challenge the validity of capital punishment in our multiracial society.” But, citing a standard previously established in civil law, he too concluded that the Court couldn’t find that McCleskey’s rights had been violated solely based on the discriminatory impact found in the study; McCleskey’s lawyers would have also needed to prove that the state had intended to discriminate against him. 1199, 12 L.Ed.2d 246 (1964), that he failed to include in his first federal petition.

For the question to outlive him is a damning commentary on capital punishment in the United States.”

In 1991, four years after Powell retired from the Supreme Court, his biographer asked him if, given the chance, he would change his vote in any case he had presided over.

Last April the Supreme Court ruled, 6 to 3, that they had waited too long to raise the claim, even though they lacked the proof -- which the state was hiding -- at the time they were supposed to raise it. For the question to outlive him is a damning commentary on capital punishment in the United States.

State courts in Connecticut and Washington have also recently ruled the death penalty unconstitutional, in part on the basis of discriminatory application. One philosophy professor’s reaction in the Los Angeles Times ran under the headline “Someday McCleskey Will Be Death Penalty’s Dred Scott.”. The precedent impairs constitutional challenges based on widespread racial disparities not just in capital sentencing, but in the criminal-justice system more widely; it requires defendants to prove discrimination on a specific basis, providing clear evidence that they were explicitly targeted because of their race. Then, just days ago, two former jurors told the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles that their votes to sentence Warren McCleskey to death would have been different had they known the informant was a police plant, with an incentive to bargain for leniency in his own criminal case. Warren McCleskey’s life—and death—are the inspirations for McCleskey, a film currently in development.

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