Coker v. Georgia

Coker v. Georgia
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 28, 1977 Decided June 29, 1977
Full case name: Erlich Anthony Coker v. State of Georgia Citations: 433 U.S. 584; 97 S. Ct. 2861; 53 L. Ed. 2d 982; 1977 U.S. LEXIS 146 Prior history: While escaped from prison, defendant raped an adult woman. He was convicted and sentenced to death, and the death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court of Georgia.
Holding
The sentence of death for the crime of rape is grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment and is therefore forbidden by the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual punishment.
Court membership
Chief Justice: Warren E. Burger Associate Justices: William J. Brennan, Potter Stewart, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr., William Rehnquist, John Paul Stevens
Case opinions
Majority by: White Joined by: Stewart, Blackmun, Stevens Concurrence by: Marshall Concurrence by: Brennan Concurrence/dissent by: Powell Dissent by: Burger Joined by: Rehnquist
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. VIII

Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977), held that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution forbade the death penalty for the crime of rape of an adult woman. While serving several sentences for murder, rape, kidnapping, and aggravated assault, Erlich Anthony Coker escaped from prison. Coker broke into Allen and Elnita Carver's home near Waycross, Georgia, raped Elnita Carver and stole the family's vehicle. Coker was convicted of rape, armed robbery, and the other offenses. He was sentenced to death on the rape charge after the jury found two of the aggravating circumstances present for imposing such a sentence: that the rape was committed by a person with prior convictions for capital felonies, and that the rape was committed in the course of committing another capital felony -- the armed robbery. The Supreme Court of Georgia upheld the sentence.

The main consequence of Coker was that the death penalty in the United States was largely restricted to crimes in which the defendant caused the death of another human being. Recently, however, some states are testing the limit of this restriction^[1] by enacting death penalty statutes for repeat child molesters. In terms of the Court's capital punishment jurisprudence, Coker signaled the Court's commitment to employing a robust proportionality test for deciding when the death penalty would be an appropriate punishment. The Court would later use this same proportionality test to evaluate the propriety of the death penalty for felony murder, mentally retarded offenders, and juvenile offenders.

Capital punishment for rape is disproportionate

The Court's proportionality jurisprudence is informed by objective evidence. This objective evidence comes from the laws enacted by state legislatures and the behavior of sentencing juries. In 1925, only 18 states authorized the death penalty for rape. In 1971, on the eve of the Court's Furman decision, only 16 states authorized the death penalty for rape. But when Furman forced the states to rewrite their capital sentencing laws, only three states -- Georgia, North Carolina, and Louisiana -- retained the death penalty for rape. In 1976, the Court struck down the capital sentencing laws of North Carolina and Louisiana for a different reason. In response to those reversals, the legislatures of North Carolina and Louisiana did not retain the death penalty for rape. Thus, at the time of the Coker decision, only Georgia retained the death penalty for the crime of rape of an adult woman.

At the time of the Coker decision, the Supreme Court of Georgia had reviewed 63 rape cases. Only six of these involved a death sentence. The Georgia court had set aside one, leaving five death sentences for rape intact from among all the rape convictions obtained since Furman. From this statistical evidence, the Court concluded that in at least 90% of rape cases, the jury did not impose a death sentence. The objective evidence – state death penalty laws and behavior of juries – suggested that the death penalty for rape was rare indeed.

But objective evidence does not dictate the outcome of the Court's proportionality analysis. The Court also brings to bear its estimation of how the death penalty in the circumstances in question would serve the goals of retribution and deterrence. Rape is a serious crime – "short of homicide, it is the ultimate violation of self." It typically involves violence and injury, both physical and psychological, but the Court denied that it involves "serious" injury. "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." In light of these facts, the Court concluded that death was an excessive punishment for "the rapist who, as such, does not take human life."

The fact that the jury had found that two aggravating factors applied to Coker's crime – his prior convictions and the fact that the rape was committed during the course of a robbery – did not change the Court's conclusion. The rape may have been committed during the course of another crime, and by a hardened criminal, but the rape did not escalate into a killing. Finally, even a deliberate killing does not merit a death sentence under Georgia law absent the finding of aggravating factors. These facts bolstered the Court's conclusion that the death penalty was a constitutionally excessive punishment for rape.

Justice White wrote the plurality opinion in this case, on behalf of Justices Stewart, Blackmun, and Stevens. The plurality opinion denied that rape causes serious injury: "Although it may be accompanied by another crime, rape by definition does not include the death of or even the serious injury to another person."

Justices Brennan and Marshall concurred in the judgment because the case struck down a death penalty, in keeping with their view that the death penalty is per se cruel and unusual punishment.

Justice Powell concurred in the judgment, but emphasized that the death penalty may be appropriate for rape if there are aggravating circumstances.

The proportionality requirement usurps legislative power

Chief Justice Burger, joined by Justice Rehnquist, dissented because he believed that the proportionality principle the Court had engrafted onto the Eighth Amendment encroached too much on the legislative power of the states. Burger preferred to concentrate on the narrow facts of the case -- was it proper for Georgia to impose the death penalty on Coker, a man who had escaped from prison while serving a sentence for murder only to rape another young woman? "Whatever one's view may be as to the State's constitutional power to impose the death penalty upon a rapist who stands before the court convicted for the first time, this case reveals a chronic rapist whose continuing danger to the community is abundantly clear."

Burger defended a state's prerogative to impose additional punishment for recidivists – including necessarily a death sentence for prisoners who commit crimes. Congress had enacted an early three-strikes law, and the federal crime of assault on a mail carrier carried a stiffer penalty for a second such offense. Other states also carried harsher penalties for "habitual criminality." For Burger, "the Eighth Amendment does not prevent the State from taking an individual's 'well-demonstrated propensity for life-endangering behavior' into account in devising punitive measures which will prevent inflicting further harm upon innocent victims." If the Court was serious about sanctioning the continued use of the death penalty, it should allow states to use it in appropriate circumstances.

Furthermore, rape is a heinous crime. "A rapist not only violates a victim's privacy and personal integrity, but inevitably causes serious psychological as well as physical harm in the process. The long-range effect upon the victim's life and health is likely to be irreparable; it is impossible to measure the harm which results." Burger disagreed with the Court's conclusion that there were no circumstances under which it was a proportional response to crime. Such a conclusion turned the Court into "the ultimate arbiter of the standards of criminal responsibility in diverse areas of the criminal law throughout the country." That was an inappropriate role for the Court to assume in the American federal system. Burger felt that Furman had injected enough uncertainty into the debate over capital punishment; it was more expedient to allow subsequent legislative developments to evolve as they may.

Burger also disagreed with the Court's assessment of the retribution and deterrence value of the death penalty for rape. The death penalty might deter at least one prospective rapist. It might encourage victims to report the crime. It might increase the general feeling of security among members of the community. The fact that the magnitude of the harm caused by the murderer is greater than that caused by the rapist was beside the point for Burger. The Eighth Amendment was not the Code of Hammurabi; if "innocent life and limb are to be preserved I see no constitutional barrier in punishing by death all who engage in...criminal activity which consistently poses serious danger of death or serious bodily harm." Accordingly, Burger argued the Court had no place dictating how the states might make law in the criminal arena.

2007 Louisiana Supreme Court decision in Kennedy case

A recent decision by the Louisiana Supreme Court may result in Supreme Court litigation over whether the Coker decision should be narrowed or expanded. On May 22, 2007, the Louisiana Supreme Court held that it is constitutional to impose the death penalty for rape where the rape victim is a child. [1] Ruling on an appeal brought in the case of defendant Patrick Kennedy, Justice Jeffrey Victory wrote for the court that the Louisiana law allowing the imposition of the death penalty under those circumstances was consistent with Coker because an aggravating circumstance -- the age of the victim -- justified the death penalty. Attorney Jelpi Picou, director of the New Orleans-based Capital Appeals Project, said he will ask the Louisiana Supreme Court for a rehearing and, if rejected, will go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Notes

1. ^ See The Dallas Morning News and The Los Angeles Times

External links

• Full text of the opinion courtesy of Findlaw.com
• Coker v. Georgia on Oyez
• Coker v. Georgia from Cornell Law School
• Struck by Lightning: Louisiana's Electrocutions for Rape in the Forties and Fifties from Burk Foster

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