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2385 Redefining Americasafe on the street again. . . . It wouldn%u2019t be too bad to hang some on the court house square, and let those who would plunder and destroy see.State representative Guy Hill of Atlanta proposed a bill that would require death by hanging to take place %u201cat or near the courthouse in the county in which the crime was committed.%u201d Georgia state representative James H. %u201cSloppy%u201d Floyd remarked, %u201cIf people commit these crimes, they ought to burn.%u201d In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia%u2019s new statute and thus reinstated the American death penalty, capitulating to the claim that legal executions were needed to prevent vigilante mob violence.%u2022 %u2022 %u2022The new death penalty statutes continued to result in racial imbalance, and constitutional challenges persisted. In the 1987 case of McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court considered statistical evidence demonstrating that Georgia officials were more than four times as likely to impose a death sentence for the killing of a white person than a black person. Accepting the data as accurate, the Court conceded that racial disparities in sentencing %u201care an inevitable part of our criminal justice system%u201d and upheld Warren McCleskey%u2019s death sentence because he had failed to identify %u201ca constitutionally significant risk of racial bias%u201d in his case.Today, large racial disparities continue in capital sentencing. African-Americans make up less than 13 percent of the national population, but nearly 42 percent of those currently on death row and 34 percent of those executed since 1976. In 96 percent of states where researchers have examined the relationship between race and the death penalty, results reveal a pattern of discrimination based on the race of the victim, the race of the defendant, 25whites that filled the courtroom, the judge promised a death sentence that would be carried out by public hanging%u2014despite state law prohibiting public executions. Even so, when the execution was set for a later date, the enraged mob threatened, %u201cWe%u2019ll hang him before sundown, governor or no governor.%u201d In response, Florida officials moved up the date, authorized Wilson to be hanged before the jeering mob, and congratulated themselves on having %u201cavoided%u201d a lynching.In the 1940s and 1950s, the NAACP%u2019s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) began what would become a multidecade litigation strategy to challenge the American death penalty%u2014which was used most actively in the South%u2014as racially biased and unconstitutional. It won in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, when the Supreme Court struck down Georgia%u2019s death penalty statute, holding that capital punishment still too closely resembled %u201cself-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law%u201d and %u201cif any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race.%u201dSouthern opponents of the decision immediately decried it and set to writing new laws authorizing the death penalty. Following Furman, Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland accused the Court of %u201clegislating%u201d and %u201cdestroying our system of government,%u201d while Georgia%u2019s white supremacist lieutenant governor, Lester Maddox, called the decision %u201ca license for anarchy, rape, and murder.%u201d In December 1972, Florida became the first state after Furman to enact a new death penalty statute, and within two years, thirty-five states had followed suit. Proponents of Georgia%u2019s new death penalty bill unapologetically borrowed the rhetoric of lynching, insisting, as Maddox put it:There should be more hangings. Put more nooses on the gallows. We%u2019ve got to make it Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.