This paper will discuss the recent developments regarding capital punishment in the United States, focusing primarily upon cases and events since 1985. Since the U.S. Supreme Court held that state death penalty statutes can be constitutionally valid in 1976 (Gregg v. Georgia), most states have enacted death penalty statutes. Most of the litigation regarding these statutes has dealt with the technical legal aspects of trial and sentencing procedure; the result has been a very lengthy appeals process where the time period between sentencing and actual execution can exceed a decade. Thus, since 1992 the U.S. Supreme Court has begun to express a certain amount of annoyance towards defendants and their attorneys who file seemingly endless appeals, especially writs of habeas corpus, in the federal courts. State supreme courts have also begun to limit the number of appeals which can be filed in state courts, explaining that defendants should litigate all issues in their initial appeals.
The landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding the constitutionality of the death penalty was Furman v. Georgia (1972). In that decision the Court held that, while the death penalty did not in and of itself violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, the state death penalty statutes were written in such a manner that allowed the imposition of the death penalty in an arbitrary and capricious manner, violating the the cruel and unusual punishment provision. As a result, all executions ceased as the state legislatures rewrote their death penalty statutes. The Gregg decision affirmed the validity of these new statutes (Gregg v. Georgia, 1976) and executions slowly began in several states.
The most important post-Furman developments consisted of 1) limiting the categories of murders in which death-sentences can be imposed, and 2) bifurcating the trial process into a guilt phase and a sentencing phase, with a jur...