Law Commons^™

Grave Injustice: Unearthing Wrongful Executions, Mary Kelly Tate

Law Faculty Publications

This book review discusses Richard A. Stack's book, Grave Injustice, which illustrates the flaws in America's use of capital punishment. "Simply put, the death penalty is shown to be a massive policy failure diminishing the legitimacy of the criminal justice system in the world's leading democracy. Stack uses his reportorial skills to distill the complex subject of the American death penalty into a digestible form, yet he never cuts corners with the human dimension. This dimension is always at the center of crime and punishment and, most hauntingly, at the center of the American death penalty and its tragic …

Death Penalty Drugs: A Prescription That's Getting Harder To Fill, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Six states have abolished the death penalty in the past six years—Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, and New Mexico. We haven’t seen mass moves like that since the 1960s. What gives?

Part of the answer is that those states weren’t executing anyway. More people in those states were dying on death row waiting to be executed than were actually being executed, and the death penalty is breathtakingly expensive to maintain (a point to which I’ll return in a moment).

So why weren’t the states executing? We tend to hear about innocence claims, trench warfare litigation, official moratoriums, study …

The Virtues Of Thinking Small, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Professor Lain argues that, in efforts to determine how close American states are to abolishing the death penalty, scholars should "think small," examining the ground level issues that affect its imposition. Among the issues she explores are exonerations of defendants, the legality and obtainability of lethal injection drugs, and the high costs of seeking and imposing capital punishment.

Watching The Watchers, Ronald J. Bacigal

Law Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the threat that increasingly sophisticated technology can pose to individual privacy. However, the author would like to provide the “yin to the yang” and point out the obvious: technology itself is not the culprit, because it is a double-edged sword, a tool that can be used to protect as well as invade privacy. We need not endorse the single-minded approach of WikiLeaks to recognize the benefits that occur when technology discloses government cover-ups or simply provides accurate information where none previously existed.