Coker v. Georgia

Coker v. Georgia
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 28, 1977 Decided June 29, 1977
Full case name	Erlich Anthony Coker v. State of Georgia
Citations	433 U.S. 584 (more) 97 S. Ct. 2861; 53 L. Ed. 2d 982; 1977 U.S. LEXIS 146
Case history
Prior	After he escaped from prison, the defendant raped an adult woman. He was convicted and sentenced to death, which was affirmed by the Supreme Court of Georgia, Coker v. State, 234 Ga. 555, 216 S.E.2d 782 (1975); cert. granted, 429 U.S. 815 (1976).
Holding
The death penalty for the rape of an adult is grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment and so is forbidden by the Eighth Amendment, as cruel and unusual punishment.
Court membership
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Potter Stewart Byron White · Thurgood Marshall Harry Blackmun · Lewis F. Powell Jr. William Rehnquist · John P. Stevens
Case opinions
Plurality	White, joined by Stewart, Blackmun, Stevens
Concurrence	Brennan
Concurrence	Marshall
Concur/dissent	Powell
Dissent	Burger, joined by Rehnquist
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amends. VIII, XIV

Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977), held that the death penalty for rape of an adult was grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment, and therefore unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.^[1]

The "evolving standards of decency" test has since been applied in other cases including Atkins v. Virginia (overturning Penry v. Lynaugh) Stanford v. Kentucky, and Roper v. Simmons.^[2]

Because only a few states continued to have child rape statutes that authorized the death penalty, the Court applied the "evolving standards of decency" review in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008) to expand Coker, ruling that the death penalty is unconstitutional for the rape of a child where there was no intention to kill the child.

Rape was a capital crime until the mid-20th century. The majority of men sentenced to death for rape were black. For example, Louisiana executed only 14 rapists between 1930 and 1967 and all of them were black.^[3]

By 1971, on the eve of the Court's Furman decision, the number of jurisdictions supporting the death penalty for rape of an adult woman had declined to 16 states and the federal government. When Furman forced the states to rewrite their capital sentencing laws, only three states (Georgia, North Carolina, and Louisiana) retained the death penalty for rape of an adult woman.^[4]

In 1976, the death penalty statutes of two of those states were struck down again for different reasons. In response to the reversals, the legislatures of North Carolina and Louisiana did not retain the death penalty for rape. Thus, at the time of the Coker decision, only Georgia retained the death penalty for the crime of rape of an adult woman.

While serving several sentences for rape, kidnapping, one count of first degree murder, and aggravated assault, Ehrlich Anthony Coker escaped from prison. He broke into Allen and Elnita Carver's home near Waycross, Georgia; raped 16 year old Elnita Carver in front of her husband, and stole the family's vehicle. Coker was convicted of rape, armed robbery, and the other offenses.

He was sentenced to death on the rape charge after the jury found two of the aggravating circumstances present for imposing such a sentence: the rape was committed by a person with prior convictions for capital felonies, and the rape was committed in the course of committing another capital felony, the armed robbery. The Supreme Court of Georgia upheld the death sentence.^[5]

Justice White wrote the plurality opinion,^[6] on behalf of Justices Stewart, Blackmun, and Stevens. The plurality decided that the death sentence was an unconstitutional punishment for rape because it was disproportionate to the crime.^[7] Coker is the first Supreme Court decision to apply a proportionality requirement for sentencing under the cruel and unusual punishments clause.^[8]

The Court held that a punishment was "excessive in violation of the Eighth Amendment if it^[9]

(1) makes no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment and hence is nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering, or (2) is grossly out of proportion to the severity of the crime

Applying the second excessiveness standard Justice White found that death was a grossly proportionate punishment for the crime of rape:^[9]

We have the abiding conviction that the death penalty, which is unique in its severity and irrevocability, is an excessive penalty for the rapist who, as such, does not take human life

The court based its substantive analysis on the "evolving standards of decency" discerned from "objective evidence" like state laws and jury sentencing behavior. Writing for the plurality Justice White took the following objective criteria into consideration:^[10]

1. After "Furman only three state legislatures had authorized the death penalty for rape
2. Nine out of ten juries in Georgia had declined to impose the death penalty in rape cases

But objective evidence does not dictate the outcome of the Court's proportionality analysis. The Court said that "the legislative rejection of capital punishment for rape strongly confirms our own judgment, which is that death is indeed a disproportionate penalty for the crime of raping an adult".^[11]

Rape is a serious crime: "Rape is very often accompanied by physical injury to the female and can also inflict mental and psychological damage. Because it undermines the community's sense of security, there is public injury as well.^[12] The Court characterized it as the "ultimate violation of self", second only to murder.

But Justice White drew a distinction between rape and murder "Life is over for the victim of the murderer; for the rape victim, life may not be nearly so happy as it was, but it is not over and normally is not beyond repair."^[12]

The court ultimately determined that, "Rape is without doubt deserving of serious punishment; but in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public, it does not compare with murder, which does involve the unjustified taking of human life."^[12]

The fact that the jury had found that two aggravating factors applied to Coker's crime (his prior convictions and the fact that the rape was committed during the course of a robbery) did not change the Court's conclusion that death was a disproportionate punishment for a rape.^[13]

Justices Brennan^[14] and Marshall^[15] concurred in the judgment because the case struck down a death penalty, in keeping with their view that the death penalty is per se cruel and unusual punishment.^[16]

Justice Powell^[17] concurred in the judgment, but he emphasized that the death penalty may be appropriate for rape if there are aggravating circumstances.^[18] He said the plurality opinion was "so sweeping as to foreclose each of the 50 state legislatures from creating a narrowly defined crime of aggravated rape".^[7]

Chief Justice Burger, joined by Justice Rehnquist dissented because he believed that the proportionality principle the Court had engrafted onto the Eighth Amendment encroached too much on the legislative power of the states.

Burger preferred to concentrate on the narrow facts of the case: Coker had raped three women, and killed one. He said making the penalty more severe than the criminal act was constitutionally permissible if the legislative purpose was deterrence:^[7]

"Whatever one's view may be as to the State's constitutional power to impose the death penalty upon a rapist who stands before the court convicted for the first time, this case reveals a chronic rapist whose continuing danger to the community is abundantly clear."

Burger defended a state's prerogative to impose additional punishment for recidivists, including a death sentence for prisoners who commit crimes. Congress had enacted an early three-strikes law, and the federal crime of assault on a mail carrier carried a stiffer penalty for a second such offense. Other states also carried harsher penalties for "habitual criminality." He believed that "the Eighth Amendment does not prevent the State from taking an individual's 'well-demonstrated propensity for life-endangering behavior' into account in devising punitive measures which will prevent inflicting further harm upon innocent victims."

He wrote that if the Court was serious about sanctioning the continued use of the death penalty, it should allow states to use it in appropriate circumstances, and disagreed with the Court's conclusion that there were no circumstances under which it was a proportional response to crime. Such a conclusion turned the Court into "the ultimate arbiter of the standards of criminal responsibility in diverse areas of the criminal law throughout the country." That was an inappropriate role for the Court to assume in the American federal system. He felt that Furman had injected enough uncertainty into the debate over capital punishment; it was more expedient to allow subsequent legislative developments to evolve.

Burger disagreed with the Court's assessment of the retribution and deterrence value of the death penalty for rape. He thought that the death penalty might deter at least one prospective rapist. It might encourage victims to report the crime. It might increase the general feeling of security among members of the community. The fact that the magnitude of the harm caused by the murderer is greater than that caused by the rapist was beside the point. The Eighth Amendment was not the Code of Hammurabi; if "innocent life and limb are to be preserved I see no constitutional barrier in punishing by death all who engage in... criminal activity which consistently poses serious danger of death or serious bodily harm." Thus, the Court had no place dictating how the states might make law in the criminal arena.

The direct consequence was the overturning of the Georgia death sentences of Coker and five other rapists, including John W. Hooks, John W. Eberheart,^[19] Donald Boyer, and William J. Hughes.^[20] Erlich Coker (his given name is also spelled as Ehrlech, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections; under the GDC ID 0000379279) is still serving multiple life sentences at the Walker State Prison, Georgia^[21] as of 2024.

On the basis of Coker, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Florida capital child rape statutes were unconstitutional in the Robert L. Buford case of 1981^[22][23] and the Lucious L. Andrews case in 1983.^[24] Before his sentence was overturned, Andrews was the last man on death row who had not murdered anyone.^[25] The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned Mississippi capital rape statutes in 1989, in its ruling in Leatherwood v. State. It dismissed Alfred D. Leatherwood's death sentence on another basis, the fact that the Louisiana capital aggravators were written to apply only to capital murder and not to rape.^[26]

After the Court held in Coker v. Georgia that the death penalty was an unconstitutionally disproportionate punishment for the rape of an adult woman some states enacted statutes allowing the death penalty for the rape of a child. This was settled in Kennedy v. Louisiana when the Court applied the "evolving standards of decency" analysis to hold that the death penalty was unconstitutional for the brutal rape of an 8 year old girl.^[27] They have also applied "evolving standards of decency" to exclude certain classes of offenders, specifically the young (Roper v. Simmons), insane (Ford v. Wainwright) and intellectually disabled (Atkins v. Virginia).^[28] Until Kennedy v. Louisiana, some states were testing the limit of this restriction.^[29]

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 433

• Text of Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977) is available from: Cornell CourtListener Findlaw Google Scholar Justia Library of Congress Oyez (oral argument audio)
• Struck by Lightning: Louisiana's Electrocutions for Rape in the Forties and Fifties from Burk Foster