Law Commons^™

Aggravation And Mitigation In Capital Cases: What Do Jurors Think?, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Capital Jury Project in South Carolina interviewed jurors who sat in forty-one capital murder cases. The Project asked jurors a range of questions relating to crime, the defendant, the victim, the victim's family, the jurors' deliberations, the conduct of counsel, and background characteristics of the jurors. In this essay, Professor Stephen P. Garvey presents and examines data from the Project relating to the importance jurors attach to various aggravating and mitigating factors. The results suggest that jurors have a discernible moral compass. According to the data, jurors found especially brutal killings, killings with child victims, future dangerousness, and lack …

But Was He Sorry? The Role Of Remorse In Capital Sentencing, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What role does remorse really play in capital sentencing? We divide this basic question in two. First, what makes jurors come to believe a defendant is remorseful? Second, does a belief in the defendant's remorse affect the jury's final judgment of life or death? Here we present a systematic, empirical analysis that tries to answer these questions.

What makes jurors think a defendant is remorseful? Among other things, we find that the more jurors think that the crime is coldblooded, calculated, and depraved and that the defendant is dangerous, the less likely they are to think the defendant is remorseful. …

Feminism And Defending Men On Death Row, Phyllis L. Crocker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In this Essay I explore the relationship between being a feminist and representing men on death row. It is appropriate to engage in this inquiry in considering how the law has developed in the twenty-five years since Furman v. Georgia. During that time both Furman and the advent of feminist legal theory have required a restructuring in the way we think about two fundamental legal questions: for death penalty jurisprudence, how and why we sentence an individual to death; and for feminist jurisprudence, how the law views crimes of violence against women. The relationship between these two developments becomes apparent …

Update: American Public Opinion On The Death Penalty - It's Getting Personal (Symposium: How The Death Penalty Works: Empirical Studies Of The Modern Capital Sentencing System), Samuel R. Gross

Articles

Americans' views on capital punishment have stabilized. In 1994, when Professor Phoebe Ellsworth and I published a review of research on death penalty attitudes in the United States,' we began by noting that "support for the death penalty [is] at a near record high."'2 That finding, like most of the others we reported, has not changed. Nonetheless, it is interesting to pause and review the data on public opinion on the death penalty that have accumulated over the past several years. Stability is less dramatic than change but it may be equally important, and there is some news to report. …