Volume 6, Number 3 (2008) Pierce Law Review

Foreword: The Perpetual Controversy

A little more than thirty years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in Gregg v. Georgia1 and its companion cases authorized the resumption of capital punishment in America. Some might have thought, at the time, that Gregg marked the end of the crisis that began four years earlier with the apparent judicial abolition of the death penalty effected by Furman v. Georgia.2 The Court, it seemed, had surrendered and would no longer interpose significant obstacles to the administration of capital punishment. The people, through their elected representatives in the state legislatures, had spoken, and the people wanted the death penalty.

From the perspective of 2008, Gregg seems less a surrender than a retreat. Far from disappearing from the Supreme Court’s docket, death penalty cases have remained a staple of the Court ever since Gregg. Rarely does a Supreme Court term pass without a decision in at least one death penalty case. Capital punishment has become, in the law at least, a source of perpetual controversy.

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