information:classification, structural:summarization, stylistic:tone
Capital punishment suspended (1972)

In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down the impositions of the death penalty in each of the consolidated cases as unconstitutional in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court has never ruled the death penalty to be per se unconstitutional. The five justices in the majority did not produce a common opinion or rationale for their decision, however, and agreed only on a short statement announcing the result. The narrowest opinions, those of Byron White and Potter Stewart, expressed generalized concerns about the inconsistent application of the death penalty across a variety of cases, but did not exclude the possibility of a constitutional death penalty law. Stewart and William O. Douglas worried explicitly about racial discrimination in enforcement of the death penalty. Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr. expressed the opinion that the death penalty was proscribed absolutely by the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual punishment. This decision was reached by the suspicion that many states, particularly in the South, were using capital punishment as a form of legal lynching of African-American males, inasmuch as almost all executions for non-homicidal rape in the Southern states involved a black perpetrator, and this suspicion was fueled by cases such as the Martinsville Seven, when seven African-American men were executed by Virginia in 1951 for the gang rape of a white woman.