In the 1970s, the United States appeared on the verge of abolishing the death penalty. Following a long steady decline in the number of annual executions from almost two hundred in 1935 to one in 1966, no executions were held in the United States for the next ten years. In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia ruled that the death penalty was being applied unfairly and inconsistently by the states that utilized it and was therefore unconstitutional. The ruling nullified existing death sentences and voided all state and federal death penalty statutes then in effect.

A number of states soon enacted new death penalty statutes to address concerns raised by Furman. In 1976 the Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that capital punishment as such was not unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment” and let most...