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Criminal Law Keyed to Gershowitz
McCleskey v. Kemp
Citation:
481 U.S. 279, 107 S.Ct. 1756, 95 L.Ed.2d 262.Facts
The defendant is a black man. Defendant’s convictions arose out of the robbery of a furniture store and the killing of a white police officer during the course of the robbery. The evidence at trial indicated that defendant and three accomplices planned and carried out the robbery. All four were armed. Defendant secured the front of the store by rounding up the customers and forcing them to lie face down on the floor. The other three rounded up the employees in the rear and tied them up with tape. The manager was forced at gunpoint to turn over the store receipts, his watch, and $ 6. During the course of the robbery, a police officer, answering a silent alarm, entered the store through the front door. As he was walking down the center aisle of the store, two shots were fired. Both struck the officer. One hit him in the face and killed him.
Several weeks later, defendant was arrested in connection with an unrelated offense. He confessed that he had participated in the furniture store robbery, but denied that he had shot the police officer. At trial, the State introduced evidence that at least one of the bullets that struck the officer was fired from a .38 caliber Rossi revolver. This description matched the description of the gun that defendant had carried during the robbery. The State also introduced the testimony of two witnesses who had heard defendant admit to the shooting.
He was sentenced to death. He appealed, arguing that the death penalty, as applied in this case, violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments because the Georgia death sentencing process is administered in a racially discriminatory manner. He presented a statistical study (“the Baldus study”) that indicated that defendants charged with killing a white person received the death penalty in 11% of the cases, but defendants charged with killing a black person received the death penalty in only 1% of the cases. Additionally, one model of the study, after taking into account 39 nonracial variables, found that defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times as likely to receive a death sentence as defendants charged with killing black victims.
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