AN IDEOLOGICAL ODYSSEY: EVOLUTION OF A REFORMER

When the US Supreme Court narrowly and temporarily struck down the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, holding that its arbitrary imposition amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, Justice Thurgood Marshall theorized in a concurring opinion that the average citizen, if fully informed of the realities of capital punishment, would "find it shocking to his conscience and sense of justice." The majority's reasoning resonated with me -- as Justice Potter Stewart put it, the death penalty was "so wantonly and freakishly imposed" that it was "cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual" -- but Marshall's thesis did not. The criminal justice system's propensity for error barely registered with me at the time, even though the author was aware of the wrongful conviction of a man named Lloyd Eldon Miller Jr., who had come within eight hours of execution for the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Hancock County, IL, in 1955.