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Full-Text Articles in Law
A Grand Slam Of Professional Irresponsibility And Judicial Disregard, Stephen A. Saltzburg
A Grand Slam Of Professional Irresponsibility And Judicial Disregard, Stephen A. Saltzburg
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Many examples of bad lawyering and indifferent judicial responses to bad lawyering concern those who seek to raise the standards of professional conduct and assure adequate legal representation for all clients. This article discusses one case (a death penalty prosecution of William Charles Payton for rape, murder and attempted murder in 1981) to illustrate just how poor the performance of lawyers can be and how largely indifferent judges often are to such performances. With the defendant's life on the line, it appears that none of the legally trained professionals at trial did what professional standards required of them. The prosecutor …
Cultural Cognition And Public Policy, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan
Cultural Cognition And Public Policy, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
People disagree about the empirical dimensions of various public policy issues. It's not surprising that people have different beliefs about the deterrent effect of the death penalty, the impact of handgun ownership on crime, the significance of global warming, the public health consequences of promiscuous sex, etc. The mystery concerns the origins of such disagreement. Were either the indeterminacy of scientific evidence or the uneven dissemination of convincing data responsible, we would expect divergent beliefs on such issues to be distributed almost randomly across the population, and beliefs about seemingly unrelated questions (whether, say, the death penalty deters and whether …
Race And The Victim: An Examination Of Capital Sentencing And Guilt Attribution Studies, Cynthia Lee
Race And The Victim: An Examination Of Capital Sentencing And Guilt Attribution Studies, Cynthia Lee
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article examines the effect of the race of the victim on legal decision making in capital and non-capital criminal cases. A large body of research on race and capital sentencing indicates that the crime victim's race affects the prosecutor's decision to seek, and the jury's decision to recommend, the death penalty. The most well known of these is undoubtedly the Baldus study, which provided the data underlying the defendant's challenge to the Georgia death penalty regime in McCleskey v. Kemp. Less well known are empirical analyses conducted since the Supreme Court rejected McCleskey's challenge. The article reviews several of …