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Full-Text Articles in Law
Merchants And Thieves, Hungry For Power: Prosecutorial Misconduct And Passive Judicial Complicity In Death Penalty Trials Of Defendants With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin
Merchants And Thieves, Hungry For Power: Prosecutorial Misconduct And Passive Judicial Complicity In Death Penalty Trials Of Defendants With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin
Articles & Chapters
In spite of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Ford v. Wainwright (1986), Atkins v. Virginia (2002), and Hall v. Florida (2014), persons with severe psychosocial and intellectual disabilities continue to be given death sentences, in some cases leading to actual execution. Although the courts have been aware of this for decades -- dating back at least to the infamous Ricky Rector case in Arkansas -- these base miscarriages of justice continue and show no sign of abating. Scholars have written clearly and pointedly on this issue (certainly, more frequently since the Atkins decision in 2002), but little has changed.
I …
Pain As Fact And Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions Of Law, Amanda C. Pustilnik
Pain As Fact And Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions Of Law, Amanda C. Pustilnik
Faculty Scholarship
Legal statuses, prohibitions, and protections often turn on the presence and degree of physical pain. In legal domains ranging from tort to torture, pain and its degree do important definitional work by delimiting boundaries of lawfulness and of entitlements. The omnipresence of pain in law suggests that the law embodies an intuition about the ontological primacy of pain. Yet, for all the work done by pain as a term in legal texts and practice, it has had a confounding lack of external verifiability. As with other subjective states, we have been able to impute pain’s presence but have not been …
Mental Illness And Self-Representation: Faretta, Godinez And Edwards, Christopher Slobogin
Mental Illness And Self-Representation: Faretta, Godinez And Edwards, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In the recent decision of Indiana v. Edwards the Supreme Court held that the right to represent oneself may be denied to defendants who are competent to stand trial if they "still suffer from severe mental illness to the point where they are not competent to conduct trial proceedings by themselves." Edwards was a surprise, given the Court's holding 15 years earlier in Godinez v. Moran that Nevada courts did not err when they permitted a mentally ill person who had been found competent to stand trial to waive the right to counsel, plead guilty and waive the presentation of …
What Atkins Could Mean For People With Mental Illness, Christopher Slobogin
What Atkins Could Mean For People With Mental Illness, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This article, written for a symposium on Atkins v. Virginia - the Supreme Court decision that prohibited execution of people with mental retardation - argues that people with severe mental illness must now also be protected from imposition of the death penalty. In labeling execution of people with mental retardation cruel and unusual, the Atkins majority stressed that mentally retarded people who kill are less blameworthy and less deterrable than the average murderer, an assertion that can also be made about people with severe mental illness. As it had in previous eighth amendment cases, however, the Court also relied heavily …
New Death Penalty Debate: What's Dna Got To Do With It, James S. Liebman
New Death Penalty Debate: What's Dna Got To Do With It, James S. Liebman
Faculty Scholarship
The nation is engaged in the most intensive discussion of the death penalty in decades. Temporary moratoria on executions are effectively in place in Illinois and Maryland, and during the winter 2001 legislative cycle legislation to adopt those pauses elsewhere cleared committees or one or more houses of the legislature, not only in Connecticut (passed the Senate Judiciary Committee) and Maryland (where it passed the entire House, and the Senate Judiciary Committee) but in Nevada (passed the Senate) and Texas (passed committees in both Houses). In the last year, abolition bills have passed or come within a few votes of …