Death Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

In the forty-four years since the Court employed the Eighth Amendment to temporarily suspend the death penalty in the United States in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, the Court has spilled an enormous amount of ink attempting to instruct the states on how to properly guide jurors’ discretion in imposing the death penalty. Yet, in its voluminous Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, the Justices spilled not one drop suggesting the familiar and unifying standard of beyond a reasonable doubt as a guide.