An Emotional Craving

Abstract

As the death penalty was falling out of use in North Carolina, the civil rights movement was underway. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty as practiced was unconstitutional. Politically conservative North Carolinians who viewed the Supreme Court as a weapon of liberal overreach reacted by reinstating the mandatory death penalty and ultimately adopting the bifurcated sentencing protocol now in use around the country. The renewed interest in the death penalty emerged from the tough-on-crime rhetoric adopted by conservatives and the Republican Party during and after the civil rights movement. North Carolina resumed executions in 1984.