On November 23, 1973, Dennis Weaver read a disturbing article in his Atlanta newspaper. Two men were found dead in a ditch along the very same highway where he had been hitchhiking the day before. Even more disturbingly, Weaver recognized that these were the very same men who had picked him up. Weaver called the police and told them he knew the victims, and that two other men had been sharing the car with them that day. He described the men and the car to the police, and the authorities quickly went after the two suspects.
Only one of those suspects was an adult-Troy Gregg, who had been hitchhiking from Florida to North Carolina with a 16-year-old named Floyd Allen. When the police found the two suspects, Gregg admitted to killing the two men, but claimed that he had done so in self defense. But Allen, interrogated in another room, told a different story. The teenager told the police he had been sleeping in the back seat of the car when the two victims pulled over so they could take a leak-they had been drinking heavily. Earlier that night, Allen said Gregg had seen the two victims holding a large wad of cash. So when the two victims stumbled down a hill to pee, Gregg lay in wait for them by the car with a loaded gun. Without any warning, he fired three shots, waking up the now startled Allen, who saw the two victims lying on the ground. His heart racing, Allen watched as his traveling companion walked calmly over to the two fallen men and shot each one again at close range in the head, execution-style, and then just as calmly emptied their pockets of cash and walked back to the car, as if he had just completed a routine conversation with his favorite bank teller.
Confronted with the testimony of his 16 year old companion, Gregg admitted to the crime. “You mean you shot these men down in cold-blooded murder just to rob them?” the police officer asked. With an air of calculated indifference, Gregg said yes.
The jury didn’t have difficulty making their decision. They sentenced Gregg to death.
But his death at the hands of the state was far from assured. Four years earlier, the Supreme Court had commuted the death sentence of another Georgian, William Henry Furman. The Justices had concluded, at that time, that Georgia was not applying the death penalty in a predictable and fair manner-it was disproportionately executing African American defendants, for example, and people without financial resources-and therefore the death penalty qualified as “cruel and unusual punishment.”
In the intervening four years, Georgia had carefully crafted new statutes laying out precisely which crimes would qualify for the death penalty. By the time Gregg executed those two men, the Attorney General of Georgia was convinced that his state’s death penalty law would pass constitutional muster. So he wasn’t worried when Gregg’s lawyers brought his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. And in fact, the Court studied the Georgia statutes, and agreed unanimously that its death penalty law was no longer cruel and unusual in its arbitrariness. They were split, however, in their assessment of whether the death penalty itself was inherently cruel and unusual, deeply divided over the issue of deterrence. After reviewing available evidence, some justices concluded that “the death penalty undoubtedly is a significant deterrent.” But others, looking at the same evidence, vigorously disagreed, writing that the death penalty “serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.”
Troy Gregg’s life was in balance, then, because members of the highest court in the land could not agree whether his death would deter other potential killers from following in his footsteps.
I’ll come back to the death penalty debates in subsequent posts. In fact, over the next few weeks, I’ll post a series of linked essays laying out my preliminary vision for how we, as a society, could make better use of science in making policy decisions.
Here, after all, were nine of the smartest people in the country at loggerheads over a question that was best answered by social scientists. The consitutionality of death penalty laws hinged on whether there was good evidence that it deters crimes.
What did they decide and why?
Stay tuned for Part 2.
View original post and comments at Scientocracy
