Word: raping
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...than usual. Nine months before, the court had allowed the imposition of the death penalty for murder. Now it was being asked to permit capital punishment for crimes in which no life has been taken. The state of Georgia was seeking permission to electrocute Ehrlich Anthony Coker for the rape of a 16-year-old housewife...
Georgia is the only state with a law calling for the death penalty for rape of an adult woman (Florida and Mississippi provide for execution for the rape of children). A local jury, after noting Coker's previous convictions for rape-murder and rape-kidnaping, ordered him to the electric chair. But Attorney Kendall contended before the Supreme Court Justices that death was so infrequently inflicted on rapists that its imposition violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Of 42 men convicted of rape in Georgia since 1973, 38 received only prison sentences...
Although both Coker and his victim were white, Kendall marshaled historical and statistical data to show that execution for rape was based on race. Before the Civil War, Georgia law was typical of Southern statutes in specifying that a white man raping a black woman could draw a fine or imprisonment "at the discretion of the court," while a slave or "free person of color" even attempting to rape a white woman could be put to death. Supposedly color-blind postwar laws were selectively enforced: since 1930, when accurate record keeping was started, 89% of the 455 rapists executed...
...point, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. of Virginia frostily asked Kendall: "What would be an appropriate punishment for a convicted rapist serving life who escapes and commits another rape?" Incarceration, Kendall replied. Powell drove the point home: "The same punishment he had before...
...acts with adults or other kids. The films are even raunchier. An 8-mm. movie shows a ten-year-old girl and her eight-year-old brother in fellatio and intercourse. In another film, members of a bike gang break into a church during a First Communion service and rape six little girls...