SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
433 U.S. 584
Coker v. Georgia
CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA
No. 75-5444 Argued: March 28, 1977 --- Decided: June 29, 1977
MR. JUSTICE WHITE announced the judgment of the Court and filed an opinion in which MR. JUSTICE STEWART, MR. JUSTICE BLACKMUN, and MR. JUSTICE STEVENS, joined ...
We have concluded that a sentence of death is grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment for the crime of rape, and is therefore forbidden by the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual punishment ... The current judgment with respect to the death penalty for rape is not wholly unanimous among state legislatures, but it obviously weighs very heavily on the side of rejecting capital punishment as a suitable penalty for raping an adult woman ... We do not discount the seriousness of rape as a crime. It is highly reprehensible, both in a moral sense and in its almost total contempt for the personal integrity and autonomy of the female victim and for the latter's privilege of choosing those with whom intimate relationships are to be established. Short of homicide, it is the "ultimate violation of self." ... Rape is without doubt deserving of serious punishment; but in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public, it does not compare with murder, which does involve the unjustified taking of human life ...
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0433_0584_ZO.htmlDeath Watch
November 2003, Page p8
Louisiana jury sentences a man to death for non-murder crime ...
By Chris Adams
A Louisiana man was sentenced to death in August for raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter. The death sentence is the first in the United States for any crime other than murder since 1977, when the United States Supreme Court held in Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977), that death is an excessive punishment for rape. No person has been executed in America for a non-homicide offense since 1964.
Patrick Kennedy, a 38-year-old African-American man, received the death sentence in Jefferson Parish, a suburb of New Orleans, under a statute passed by the Louisiana legislature in 1995. He is the first person sentenced to death under the law.
In 1996, in two consolidated pretrial cases, the Louisiana Supreme Court held that the child-rape statue passed constitutional muster. State v. Wilson and Bethley, 685 So.2d 1053 (La. 1996). The court distinguished Coker by saying it involved the rape of an adult ...
Between 1930 and 1972, 455 men were executed for rape in United States, all but two in the South. Of them, 405, or 90 percent, were black. Louisiana has never executed a white man for rape ...
ttp://www.nacdl.org/public.nsf/941a6d5b3ad55cd485256b05008143fd/277b172862989eef85256e540074c1b1
from the September 08, 2003 edition
Judicial rarity: death penalty in a rape case
Louisiana law on child rape revives debate over penalty in nonmurder cases.
By Kris Axtman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
... Missouri, in 1964, was the last state to execute someone for rape. Many states had such laws on the books until 1977 when the US Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty could not be imposed in the rape of an adult woman. The justices called the sentence disproportionate to the crime, and outlawed it as cruel and unusual punishment ...
Part of the problem with such a law, says Judy Benitez, executive director of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault, is that children are required to testify against their attacker - most often a family member or friend.
Indeed, 93 percent of all juvenile sexual-assault victims knew their attacker, according to US Department of Justice statistics from 2000.
"Being held responsible for killing Uncle Sammy is just too heavy a burden to place on the shoulders of an 11-year-old," says Ms. Benitez. "There are already so many hurdles in getting a child to come forward." ...
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0908/p02s02-usju.htmlA Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Billy Sothern
April 24, 2007 (web only)
On March 2, 1998, an 8-year-old girl was raped in Harvey, Louisiana, across the river from New Orleans. At the trial of Patrick Kennedy, five years later, a jury credited the state's version of the facts--that the little girl was awakened early in the morning to find her 300-pound stepfather on top of her, undressing her, with his hand over her mouth to keep her quiet before forcing himself inside her, causing internal injuries and heavy bleeding. The jury heard that for the initial eighteen months after the rape, the girl had insisted that she was raped by two teenage boys outside her house; they heard that she did not assert that her stepfather had raped her until after she was removed from her mother's care, placed in foster care and told that her stepfather was the person responsible.
They heard that, following the rape, Patrick Kennedy called his place of work to tell them that he would not be coming in because his little girl had "become a lady" and then called a cleaning company to have blood removed from his carpets, all before calling 911 to report that his stepdaughter had been raped and requesting an ambulance. With no DNA establishing the offender, with conflicting stories--a genuine "he said, she said" trial--the jury credited the emotional testimony of the young victim as she testified at trial and found Kennedy guilty as charged.
At the penalty-phase of the trial, the jury heard Kennedy's goddaughter testify that she had been raped by him twenty years earlier when she was 8 or 9 years old, though Kennedy was never charged with that offense. On the basis of this evidence, and empowered with a unique Louisiana statute, the jury sentenced Kennedy to death, making him the only person on America's death row for a crime less than murder. For that matter, his sentence made him the only person on death row in any Western democracy for the crime of child rape ...
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/sothernDeath row for child rape? Cruel and unusual punishment under the Roper-Atkins "evolving standards of decency" framework by Joanna D'Avella
link to PDF file The Sixty-Second General Assembly Approves Moratorium on Death Penalty
For the first time, the UN General Assembly approved a moratorium on the use of the death penalty. Hailed as a milestone for human rights by some Member States while criticized by others, the controversial resolution was adopted in the plenary on 18 December 2007, in a recorded vote of 104 in favour and 54 against, with 29 abstentions. Explaining their position prior to the vote, Antigua and Barbuda, speaking on behalf of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), noted that the provisions in the resolution were unbalanced. Barbados further pointed out that capital punishment was not prohibited by international law. Singapore stressed the deterrent effect of the death penalty on offenders. Mexico was the only nation to speak in favour of the moratorium prior to adoption of the draft resolution that some Member States described as “divisive.”
Capital punishment has been a source of controversy for decades. This most severe of legal punishments that includes beheading, electrocution, hanging, lethal injection, shooting and stoning was carried out officially against 1,591 people in 25 countries during 2006, among them the United States, with 53 executions. In its 2006 death penalty statistics, Amnesty International reported that 3,861 people were sentenced to death in 55 countries and 1,010 were presumed to have been executed in China.
The third Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” With the 60th anniversary of the Declaration set to be celebrated in 2008, there are still 64 countries that continue to apply capital punishment for ordinary crimes, according to Amnesty International. In 2006, the death penalty was completely abolished in 90 countries; another 11 States have abolished it for all but exceptional crimes, such as war crimes.
Capital punishment still remains in the legal systems of a number of countries worldwide. The first international attempt to abolish capital punishment dates back to 1948 with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was followed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1966. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR), 160 countries that have ratified or acceded to the Covenant have become legally bound States parties. In 1989, the General Assembly adopted a Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, aimed at the abolition of the death penalty; to date, only 64 countries have ratified it. The United States has not signed the Second Optional Protocol, while France finally ratified it, abolishing the death penalty in October 2007. Of the countries that still have capital punishment in their constitutions, thirty-two nations could be considered as abolitionists in practice, according to Amnesty International, because there has not been an execution in these countries for the past ten or more years ...
http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2008/webarticles/080103_deathpenalty.html
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