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29 Wash. & Lee J. Civ. Rts. & Soc. Just. 169 (2022-2023)
Does the Death Penalty Still Matter: Reflections of a Death Row Lawyer

handle is hein.journals/walee29 and id is 429 raw text is: Does the Death Penalty Still Matter: Reflections of a Death Row Lawyer' David I. Bruck Frances Lewis Law Center Washington & Lee School of Law, April, 2002 My own life as a lawyer coincides quite exactly with the modern era of capital punishment in the United States. I started law school less than two months after the United States Supreme Court had seemingly swept the whole problem into the dust-bin of history with its decision in Furman v. Georgia. But on July 2, 1976, less than two months after I'd started work as a fledgling public defender in Columbia, South Carolina, the Supreme Court validated the death penalty's return in Gregg v. Georgia. Still, in those earliest years after Gregg, it didn't seem likely that the death penalty was really back to stay. At least, it didn't seem likely to me. After all, all the other Western democracies had already abolished it, or were about to. And our own country soon proved itself much quicker to pass death penalty laws, and send people to death row, than to actually execute anyone. The death penalty seemed an anachronism, a vestigial institution, a throwback to a pre- Warren Court era of segregated drinking fountains and third-degree police interrogations. Surely a hard shove by a few determined defenders would cause the whole death penalty apparatus to shudder to a halt forever. Or at least that's how my own thinking went back in the winter of 1980, when I read a local newspaper story about the re- sentencing of two men, half-brothers, who'd killed a gas station owner during a bungled, drug-addled robbery two and a half years earlier, just a month or so after South Carolina's post-Gregg death penalty statute took effect. Their original death sentences had been reversed by the South Carolina Supreme Court on grounds 1. This talk is a follow-up to Does the Death Penalty Matter? given 12 years ago as the 1990 Ralph E. Shikes Lecture at Harvard Law School. 1 RECONSTRUCTION No. 3, 1991. 169

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