Sumner v. Shuman

This case presents the question whether a statute that mandates the death penalty for a prison inmate who is convicted of murder while serving a life sentence without possibility of parole comports with the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

I

In 1958, respondent Raymond Wallace Shuman was convicted in a Nevada state court of first-degree murder for the shooting death of a truckdriver during a roadside robbery. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole under § 200.030 of Nev. Rev. Stat., which at that time provided the jury with sentencing options of the death penalty…