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Full-Text Articles in Law

Plea Bargaining And The Right To The Effective Assistance Of Counsel: Where The Rubber Hits The Road In Capital Cases, John H. Blume Dec 2012

Plea Bargaining And The Right To The Effective Assistance Of Counsel: Where The Rubber Hits The Road In Capital Cases, John H. Blume

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


The Delaware Death Penalty: An Empirical Study, Sheri Johnson, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Valerie P. Hans, Martin T. Wells Oct 2012

The Delaware Death Penalty: An Empirical Study, Sheri Johnson, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Valerie P. Hans, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

For the last five years, we have conducted an empirical study of the “modern era” of capital punishment in Delaware. By “modern era,” we refer to the time period after the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v.Georgia, which invalidated all then-existing state death penalty regimes. Some readers might ask, “Why Delaware?” They might observe that it is a small state and is not a significant national player in terms of death sentences imposed or death row inmates executed. While both are true, several features of Delaware’s capital punishment system intrigue us. First, Delaware has a high death sentencing rate. …


Madness Alone Punishes The Madman: The Search For Moral Dignity In The Court's Competency Doctrine As Applied In Capital Cases, J. Amy Dillard Apr 2012

Madness Alone Punishes The Madman: The Search For Moral Dignity In The Court's Competency Doctrine As Applied In Capital Cases, J. Amy Dillard

All Faculty Scholarship

The purposes of the competency doctrine are to guarantee reliability in criminal prosecutions, to ensure that only those defendants who can appreciate punishment are subject to it, and to maintain moral dignity, both actual and apparent, in criminal proceedings. No matter his crime, the “madman” should not be forced to stand trial. Historically, courts viewed questions of competency as a binary choice, finding the defendant either competent or incompetent to stand trial. However, in Edwards v. Indiana, the Supreme Court conceded that it views competency on a spectrum and offered a new category of competency — borderline-competent. The Court held …


David Baldus And The Legacy Of Mccleskey V. Kemp, Samuel R. Gross Jan 2012

David Baldus And The Legacy Of Mccleskey V. Kemp, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

The first major empirical challenge to racial discrimination in the use of the death penalty in the United States was presented in federal court in the case of William L. Maxwell, who was sentenced to death in Arkansas in 1962 for the crime of rape.1 It was based on a landmark study by Marvin Wolfgang, a distinguished criminologist who had collected data on some 3000 rape convictions from 1945 through 1965 in selected counties across eleven southern states.2 He found that black men who were convicted of rape were seven times more likely to be sentenced to death than white …


The Texas Deterrence Muddle, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller, Franklin E. Zimring Jan 2012

The Texas Deterrence Muddle, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller, Franklin E. Zimring

Faculty Scholarship

The ongoing debate about capital punishment in the United States juggles several contentious questions. Innocence, cost, racial fairness, proportionality, retributivist calculus, and deterrence concerns thread a literature whose richness testifies to the endurance of capital punishment in American legal and political culture. For proponents of capital punishment, the connection between the moral and utilitarian or consequentialist positions trumps all other concerns: They suggest that if the death penalty can prevent – through the incapacitation of the offender and general deterrence of would-be killers – the loss of even one innocent life from murder, then execution is a morally justified or …


Capital Punishment And The Intellectually Disabled: Controversies, Constitutionality, And The Supreme Court, Dill Ayres Jan 2012

Capital Punishment And The Intellectually Disabled: Controversies, Constitutionality, And The Supreme Court, Dill Ayres

The Trinity Papers (2011 - present)

No abstract provided.