"A Wild Justice," by Evan J. Mandery Furman v. Georgia is among the oddest Supreme Court cases in American history. Decided in 1972, it struck down every death penalty statute in the nation as then practiced without outlawing the death penalty itself. The ruling, based on the constitutional protection against "cruel and unusual punishment," stunned even the closest court watchers. The death penalty seemed impregnable. It was part of the bedrock of America's legal system, steeped in the intent of the founders, the will of most state legislatures and the forceful - if occasional - rulings of the courts. The 5-4 vote in Furman reflected a striking political split: all five members of the majority were holdovers from the Warren Court, known for its liberal decisions, while all four dissenters were recent appointees of Richard Nixon, who had won the White House with a carefully orchestrated law-and-order campaign. And notably, each justice wrote his own opinion in Furman, meaning there was no common thread to the case, no controlling rationale. The decision ran to several hundred pages, the longest handed down by the court at the time. Explaining Furman and its implications can be tricky, but Evan Mandery, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has done both with remarkable ease. "A Wild Justice" covers a decade's worth of litigation, beginning in the mid-1960s with a daring strategy by death penalty abolitionists to grab the Supreme Court's attention and ending in the mid-1970s with an angry public backlash and a crushing legal defeat. Mandery knows how to tell a story, and he's done some terrific research. His judgments are crisp and generally fair-minded, despite a clear sympathy for the abolitionist side. Still, at 534 pages, "A Wild Justice" contains few surprises. What Mandery has done, for the most part, is add depth to a now familiar tale. The first sustained legal assault on the death penalty was organized by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and led by a group of young attorneys who viewed capital punishment as a civil rights issue because of the high percentage of blacks on death row. But defending a single race from execution seemed callous at best. "We felt a legal and moral obligation to extend representation to other clients, many of whom had suffered the same injustices," said Anthony Amsterdam, the Defense Fund's top litigator. With more than 600 prisoners awaiting execution, the group pushed two key arguments in the courts: flawed process and evolving standards of decency. Flawed process referred to the combination of wide discretion and poor guidance facing jurors in capital trials. The end result, said the Defense Fund, was an irreversible punishment capriciously applied. Evolving standards relied on a different approach, challenging the death penalty's sacred-cow status in politics and law. Times change, the defense group argued, and attitudes do too. Americans no longer supported whipping or branding or public hanging. In a 1958 Supreme Court case on another matter, the majority had agreed "the cruel and unusual punishments clause must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." As the Defense Fund saw it, these evolving standards now included rejecting the death penalty as well. Three justices seemed certain to buy in: Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, who opposed the death penalty in all circumstances, and William O. Douglas, who loved common people in the abstract, Mandery notes, but abused everyone around him in real life. Firmly on the other side were the four Nixon appointees: Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist. Their feeling about the death penalty ranged from Blackmun's personal squeamishness to Rehnquist's muscular support, but all agreed the issue belonged in the state legislatures, not in the federal courts. That left Furman in the hands of the two swing justices, Potter Stewart and Byron White. David Oshinsky, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, holds a joint appointment in the history department and the school of medicine at New York University.