Cite as: 506 U. S. 461 (1993)
Thomas, J., concurring
for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race." Id., at 310 (concurring opinion).
The unquestionable importance of race in Furman is reflected in the fact that three of the original four petitioners in the Furman cases were represented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. This representation was part of a concerted "national litigative campaign against the constitutionality of the death penalty" waged by a small number of ambitious lawyers and academics on the Fund's behalf. Burt, Disorder in the Court: The Death Penalty and the Constitution, 85 Mich. L. Rev. 1741, 1745 (1987). Although their efforts began rather modestly, assisting indi-gent black defendants in isolated criminal cases—usually rape cases—where racial discrimination was suspected, the lawyers at the Fund ultimately devised and implemented (not without some prompting from this Court) an all-out strategy of litigation against the death penalty. See generally M. Meltsner, Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment (1973) (hereinafter Meltsner); Muller, The Legal Defense Fund's Capital Punishment Campaign: The Distorting Influence of Death, 4 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 158 (1985).3 This campaign was part of a larger movement carried on in the 1960's by "abolitionist lawyers" whose
3 According to the published account of one Legal Defense Fund lawyer who participated in the campaign, the Fund—though it had had experience with racial discrimination in rape cases in the South—did not seriously consider a broader offensive against the death penalty until three Members of this Court, in an opinion dissenting from a denial of certiorari, offered a "strong foundation" for such a strategy. Meltsner 27-35. See Rudolph v. Alabama, 375 U. S. 889 (1963) (Goldberg, J., joined by Douglas and Brennan, JJ., dissenting from denial of certiorari) (calling on the Court to decide "whether the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments . . . permit the imposition of the death penalty on a convicted rapist who has neither taken nor endangered human life" and suggesting several lines of argument in the form of questions that "seem relevant and worthy of . . . consideration").
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