Georgia has played a very significant role in landmark US Supreme Court cases around the issues of arbitrariness and racial disparities in the death penalty:
In Furman v. Georgia (1972), all existing death penalty statutes were declared unconstitutional. Using a case from Georgia as a test case, Justice Potter Stewart said, “these death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual,” because they are capriciously, freakishly, and wantonly imposed. Several of the justices cited evidence of racial bias in their written opinions.
In Gregg v. Georgia (1976), the death penalty was reinstated after several states, including Georgia, passed laws to guide the discretion used to make death penalty decisions. These changes were supposed to avoid arbitrariness, yet the problem still remains.
In McClesky v. Kemp (1987), the Supreme Court accepted research by Professor David Baldus and the General Accounting Office of the US government demonstrating that race was a significant factor in the determination of death sentences in Georgia. Despite these findings, Georgia was allowed to execute the man in question – Warren McClesky– and the state has never instituted any new laws that would address biases according to race.