Coker and the death penalty for sex crimes

As I discussed in Thursday's class, in Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977), the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment categorically prohibits the death penalty for the crime of rape of an adult woman.  Coker is an amazing read, in part because the defendant, Ehrlich Anthony Coker, would seem to be a poster boy for the death penalty.  Consider the syllabus from the Coker ruling:

While serving various sentences for murder, rape, kidnaping, and aggravated assault, petitioner escaped from a Georgia prison and, in the course of committing an armed robbery and other offenses, raped an adult woman.  He was convicted of rape, armed robbery, and the other offenses and sentenced to death on the rape charge, when the jury found two of the aggravating circumstances present for imposing such a sentence, viz., that the rape was committed (1) by a person with prior capital-felony convictions and (2) in the course of committing another capital felony, armed robbery.  The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed both the conviction and sentence. Held: The judgment upholding the death sentence is reversed and the case is remanded.

You can find the full opinion in Coker at this link.  Also, Wikipedia has this useful summary of the Coker ruling, which include a link to this interesting article.  That article has this useful pre-Furman data on capital prosecutions and executions:

[In the years before Furman, as] a practical matter, the death penalty had nearly withered away for crimes other than murder and rape.   From 1930 to 1967, over 3,300 persons were executed for homicide, 455 for rape, and only 70 (or less than 2% of the total) for all other non-homicidal offenses, including robbery, burglary, attempted murder, kidnaping, assault by a life-term prisoner, carnal knowledge, espionage, assault with intent to rape and accessory to murder.

In this era, executions for rape were carried out exclusively in the Southern states (including the border states of Oklahoma, Missouri and Delaware), and they were carried out predominately on black men convicted of raping white women.  Of the 455 rapists executed, 405 (89%) were black. Professor Marvin Wolfgang's research on the death penalty for rape, reported as "Racial Discrimination in the Death Sentence for Rape" in William Bowers's Executions in America (1974), showed that over one-third of black defendants convicted of raping white victims received death sentences; in all other racial combinations of victim and defendant, only 2% received death sentences.

Of course, the meaning of Coker and the realities of capital punishment for sex offenses is not just of historical interest now.  As detailed here, a number of states (mostly southern states) have enacted or are actively debating making some child rape offenses death-eligible.  And, as discussed in this FindLaw column, in August 2003, Patrick O. Kennedy was sentenced to Louisiana's death-row for the rape of an eight-year-old child.  As I mentioned in class, significant constitutional litigation over the death penalty for child rape seems like a certainty over the next decade.

For anyone interested in broader sex crime punishment developments, be sure to make regular visits to the blog Sex Crimes.