Memorandum on Capital Punishment Press Conference

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From: Norman Bloomfield San - bie NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund 
10 Columbus Circle fi 
New York, New York 10019 

(212) 586-8397 

MEMO TO CITY EDITOR AND NATIONAL NEWS EDITOR 

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund will hold a press 

conference dealing with capital punishment on Wednesday (June 12) at 

3:00 p.m. in its national office, 10 Columbus Circle. you are cordially 

invited to cover the meeting. 

On that day, we anticipate that the number of individuals on Death 

Rows in 16 states will hit or pass the 100 mark. Coincident with this 

barbaric milestone, the Legal Defense Fund is asking the U.S. Supreme Court 

on Tuesday (June 11) to review the convictions and death sentences of four 

black North Carolina prisoners. They are David Dillard, Albert Crowder, Jr., 

Tommy Noell and Henry N. Jarrette. 

This is the first time any death sentences have been challenged in 

the U.S. Supreme Court since the Furman decision of June 29, 1972. In 

that ruling, arising out of three Legal Defense Fund cases (collectively 

called Furman v. Georgia), the High Court held that the death penalty is 

unconstitutional when the sentencing authority is free to decide between 

death and some other lesser penalty. The Furman decision, which held 

this form of death penalty to be "cruel and unusual punishment," spared 

the lives of 631 on Death Rows. 

In the intervening two years since Furman, 28 states have reinsti- 

tuted capital punishment statutes, assuming that the statutes could meet 

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constitutional requirements by imposing standards to control jury 

discretion, or by making the death penalty automatic upon conviction 

of certain crimes. 

The Legal Defense Fund is attacking the four North Carolina 

death sentences on the grounds that they are in violation of the 

Furman decision, in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments 

of the Constitution, and in one instance, that the death penalty is 

excessive and aberrational. 

There is evidence of continuing discrimination in the imposition 

of the death penalty; 52 of the 99 persons on Death Rows as of June 6 

were non white. At the time of Furman, 57.7 per cent of those on Death 

Rows were black. 

The Legal Defense Fund and its cooperating attorneys, working with 

distinguished law professors, has succeeded in stopping all executions in 

this country since 1967. It will continue to challenge all death penalties 

arising out of new state laws -- as well as all convictions arising out of 

older statutes. 

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