single day on several other occasions, the last being on August 9, 2000. Since then, the state has not executed more than one person on a single day, although there are no laws prohibiting it. A total of 361 people were electrocuted in Texas, with the last being Joseph Johnson on July 30, 1964. The United States Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia (), which declared Georgia's "unitary trial" procedure (in which the jury was asked to return a verdict of guilt or innocence and, simultaneously, determine whether the defendant would be punished by death or life imprisonment) to be unconstitutional, on the grounds that it was a cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, essentially negated all death penalty sentences nationwide. As result of the Furman decision, the 52 Texas death-row inmates at the time had all of their sentences reduced to life imprisonment. Among them was Kenneth McDuff, who was originally condemned for the murder of three teenagers in 1966. He was paroled in 1989, but subsequently executed in 1998 for a murder he committed while on parole, and is suspected to have been responsible for many other killings. Furman led to a 1973 revision of the laws, primarily by introducing the bifurcated trial process (where the guilt-innocence and punishment phases are separate), and narrowly limited the legal definition of capital murder (and, thus, those offenses for which the death penalty could be imposed). The first person sentenced to death under the new Texas statute was John Devries on February 15, 1974; Devries hanged himself in his cell on July 1, 1974 (using bedsheets from his bunk), before he could be executed. In 1976, the Supreme Court decision in Jurek v. Texas once again allowed for the death penalty to be imposed. (Jurek was a companion case in the Gregg decision, and was upheld by the Court; the Court stated that Texas' death penalty scheme could potentially result in fewer death penalty cases, an irony given that post-Gregg Texas has by far executed more inmates than any other state.) However, the first execution in Texas after this decision would not take place until December 7, 1982, with that of Charles Brooks, Jr. Brooks was also the first person to be judicially executed by lethal injection in the world, and the first African American to be executed in the United