Supreme Court halts executions; 630 death sentences vacated in a single morning

By the summer of 1972, more than 600 people sat on death rows across the United States, sentenced under procedures that gave juries almost no guidance on when to impose death. On June 29, 1972, the Supreme Court issued its per curiam ruling in Furman v. Georgia, holding that the arbitrary and inconsistent application of capital punishment violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments' prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In a single morning, 630 death sentences were vacated and commuted to life imprisonment — the largest mass commutation in American history. Thirty-five states and the federal government rewrote their death penalty laws within four years…