On the 29th of June, 1972, nine people in very long robes sat down in Washington D.C., had a good long think, and collectively decided that the death penalty unconstitutional ruling was the order of the day. Capital punishment, as administered by the individual American states, was henceforth banned. The nation held its breath. Lawyers rejoiced. And then, four years later, everyone apparently changed their minds and carried on regardless. Brilliant.
The Death Penalty Unconstitutional Ruling: A Very Brief Victory
The landmark case was Furman v. Georgia, and it remains one of the most dramatic legal U-turns in American history. The Supreme Court found that capital punishment, as it was then being meted out, violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In plain English: it was cruel, unusual, and frankly a bit of a mess.
However, the jubilation among opponents of capital punishment lasted approximately as long as a British summer. By 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the court reinstated it. One imagines the justices arriving back at their enormous marble building, slightly sheepish, quietly un-filing all the paperwork they had filed four years prior.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere on This Magnificent Date in History
June 29th, as it turns out, is an absolutely spectacular day for historical chaos. In 1853, the United States completed its contiguous borders by purchasing a chunk of Mexico for $10 million in the Gadsden Purchase. That is roughly 29,000 square miles of desert for less than the price of a modern studio flat in London. Bargain of the century, arguably.
Then there is 1992, when doctors in Pittsburgh performed the world’s first baboon liver transplant into a human patient. The man survived three months, which is either a triumph of medicine or a deeply unsettling omen, depending on your philosophical leanings. Furthermore, in 1995, the space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir for the very first time, proving that humans are at their absolute best when doing things in space and at their most confusing when doing things in courtrooms.
Ponzi Schemes, Plague Victims, and Presidential Handovers
Consequently, if you were looking for a date to illustrate just how magnificently strange human civilisation truly is, June 29th makes an exceedingly strong case. In 2009, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for orchestrating a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. The judge called his crimes extraordinarily evil. Madoff apologised. Nobody was particularly moved.
Meanwhile, in 2021, scientists announced the discovery of a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer skeleton in Latvia who had the dubious distinction of being history’s earliest known bubonic plague victim. Poor fellow. Died of plague, then had to wait five millennia to even get a mention in the news. And in 1974, Isabel Peron became president of Argentina when her husband Juan took rather ill, making her the world’s first female head of state. June 29th, it seems, does not do things by halves.
The Death Penalty Unconstitutional Ruling: What It All Means, Really
The truth is, the death penalty unconstitutional ruling of 1972 tells us something rather profound about how societies change their minds, slowly, loudly, and often with considerable embarrassment. The debate around capital punishment in America continues to this day, with the Death Penalty Information Center tracking executions, exonerations, and public opinion in exhaustive detail. The numbers remain contentious. The arguments remain fierce.
In summary: June 29th is a date that gave us the death penalty unconstitutional ruling, a baboon liver transplant, a man sentenced to 150 years, and the world’s unluckiest Latvian. History, as ever, is deeply, magnificently weird and we would not have it any other way.
Read the original story at UPI Odd News.
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