Law Commons^™

Gallery Of The Doomed: An Exploration Of Creative Endeavors By The Condemned, Roberta M. Harding

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Article examines creative expressions produced by the death row faction of the incarcerated population. Looking at these works provide insights about what it means to live as a condemned person in our society, and about the people who occupy the death rows across our nation. After reviewing and analyzing a substantial amount of the enormous body of work of this genre, it became apparent that the condemned's creative endeavors reflect how they address and handle serious issues such as their executions and the ways spirituality influences their life. When the individual issues are examined, two general themes are evident: …

Opting For Real Death Penalty Reform, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

The capital punishment system in the United States is broken. Studies reveal growing delays nationwide between death sentences and executions and inexcusably high rates of reversals and retrials of capital verdicts. The current system persistently malfuinctions because it rewards trial actors, such as police, prosecutors, and trial judges, for imposing death sentences, but it does not force them either to avoid making mistakes or to bear the cost of mistakes that are made during the process. Nor is there any adversarial discipline imposed at the trial level because capital defendants usually receive appointed counsel who either do not have experience …

Rates Of Reversible Error And The Risk Of Wrongful Execution, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Innocent fatalities are a concern of all social activity with a capacity to kill. This is especially true when the social activity is the death penalty since an innocent person's execution is not simply a tragic collateral consequence of activity with a non-fatal objective. Instead, the taking of life is the goal of the enterprise, and the killing is the intended act of the state.

There is another difference between accidental fatalities in other social activities and those that occur when the capital system miscarries. Typically, the former fatalities are easy to spot and quantify; the latter are not. Precisely …