McCleskey v. Kemp

Facts of the Case

On October 12, 1978, Warren McCleskey and three other Black men robbed a furniture store. All four men were armed when they entered the store. The employees were gathered and tied, while store patrons were forced to lie face down on the floor. During the course of the robbery, a White police officer entered the store, called by a silent alarm triggered from within the store. The officer was shot twice and died from the wound. McCleskey left the scene of the crime before the authorities arrived.

Weeks later, McCleskey was arrested for another offense. He confessed to being involved in the robbery of the furniture store. The bullet that struck the officer matched the gun that McCleskey had in his possession at the time of the robbery. There were also two witnesses who said they heard McCleskey admit that he had shot the officer. McCleskey was tried in Fulton County, Georgia, and convicted of murder. The jury sentenced him to death.

Basis for McCleskey's Appeal

McCleskey took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court in the hopes of having his death sentence reversed. McCleskey had two grounds upon which he felt the sentence had violated his constitutional rights. First, he felt that the Georgia capital punishment laws violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. McCleskey argued that the Georgia court had violated his rights by giving him the death sentence based on the fact that he was a Black man accused of killing a White man. He felt that race [Page 489]played more of a part in determining the outcome of his case than did the facts, and that his sentence was disproportionate to other similarly situated offenders. Second, McCleskey argued that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment and thus forbidden by the Eighth Amendment. He claimed that the death penalty in Georgia was being applied in a discriminatory manner. Moreover, it was an arbitrary system that allowed too much discretion on the part of the juries to impose sentences.

To support this belief, McCleskey introduced a study published by Baldus, Woodworth, and Pulaski (1990) to make a prima facie case of racial discrimination. The Baldus study had gathered information on approximately 2,500 murder cases tried in Georgia in the 1970s. After controlling for more than 200 factors, the results showed that race had had a significant effect on the sentencing of offenders. The results of the study showed that Blacks who killed Whites had a greater likelihood than Whites of receiving the death penalty. This strongly suggested racial bias on the part of the state when sentencing minority offenders and therefore violated constitutional rights.

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