Law Commons^™

A Tale Of Two (And Possibly Three) Atkins: Intellectual Disability And Capital Punishment Twelve Years After The Supreme Court's Creation Of A Categorical Bar, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Paul Marcus, Emily C. Paavola

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article examines empirically the capital cases decided by the lower courts since the United States Supreme Court created the categorical ban against the execution of persons with intellectual disability twelve years ago in the Atkins decision.

Getting Jurors To Awesome, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A 2011 American Bar Association report on the death penalty in Kentucky revealed that a shocking two-thirds of the 78 people sentenced to death in Kentucky since reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 have had their sentences overturned on appeal. Kentucky’s reversal rate is more than twice the national average, with a 31% reversal rate in capital cases and almost four times the 17% national reversal rate in all other case types. With a sentence as irreversible as death, troubling does not begin to describe the depth of concern many experience when viewing such a startling statistic.

A closer …

Executing Whiteness: Fictional And Nonfictional Accounts Of Capital Punishment In The United States, 1915-1940, Daniel Lachance

Studio for Law and Culture

Over the course of the nineteenth century, elites in the United States increasingly sought to privatize executions and rationalize execution protocols. The source of this change is well known to historians of punishment: a fear that public executions had become unwieldy spectacles drove state actors to move these events into jail yards, at first, and then, with the advent of new technologies, into the interior of centralized prisons that were often far from the county in which the crime had occurred. The centralization of executions and the rationalization of execution protocols reflected and reinforced a more bureaucratic image of the …

Foreword: The Death Penalty In Decline: From Colonial America To The Present, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article traces the history of capital punishment in America. It describes the death penalty's curtailment in colonial Pennsylvania by William Penn, and the substantial influence of the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria -- the first Enlightenment thinker to advocate the abolition of executions -- on the Founding Fathers' views. The Article also describes the transition away from "sanguinary" laws and punishments toward the "penitentiary system" and highlights the U.S. penal system's abandonment of non-lethal corporal punishments.

Kentucky Criminal Law Experts Call For Reform, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Popular Media

In this article for Bench & Bar Magazine (the Kentucky Bar Association's magazine), Professor Cortney Lollar discusses the Second Annual Forum on Criminal Law in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Cold Comfort Food: A Systematic Examination Of The Rituals And Rights Of The Last Meal, Sarah Gerwig-Moore

Articles

Last meals are a resilient ritual accompanying executions in the United States. Yet states vary considerably in the ways they administer last meals. This paper explores the recent decision in Texas to abolish the tradition altogether. It seeks to understand, through consultation of historical and contemporary sources, what the ritual signifies. We then go on to analyze execution procedures in all 35 of the states that allowed executions in 2010, and show that last meal allowances are paradoxically at their most expansive in states traditionally associated with high rates of capital punishment (Texas now being the exception to that rule.) …

The Dignity Of The Human Person: Catholic Social Teaching And The Practice Of Criminal Punishment, Dora W. Klein

Faculty Articles

The moral foundation that supports the Catholic Church's opposition to the death penalty is wide and deep. This Article proposes that despite the oft-repeated maxim that "death is different," the same foundation that supports efforts to abolish the death penalty can also support those who seek to achieve other reforms in the practice of criminal punishment.

Murder, Minority Victims, And Mercy, Aya Gruber

Publications

Should the jury have acquitted George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martin's murder? Should enraged husbands receive a pass for killing their cheating wives? Should the law treat a homosexual advance as adequate provocation for killing? Criminal law scholars generally answer these questions with a resounding "no." Theorists argue that criminal laws should not reflect bigoted perceptions of African Americans, women, and gays by permitting judges and jurors to treat those who kill racial and gender minorities with undue mercy. According to this view, murder defenses like provocation should be restricted to ensure that those who kill minority victims receive the harshest …

Lethal Injection Chaos Post-Baze, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

In 2008, with Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court broke decades of silence regarding state execution methods to declare Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol constitutional, yet the opinion itself did not offer much guidance. In the six years after Baze, legal challenges to lethal injection soared as states scrambled to quell litigation by modifying their lethal injection protocols. My unprecedented study of over 300 cases citing Baze reveals that such modifications have occurred with alarming frequency. Moreover, even as states purportedly rely on the Baze opinion, they have changed their lethal injection protocols in inconsistent ways that bear little …

Rate Of False Conviction Of Criminal Defendants Who Are Sentenced To Death, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien, Chen Hu, Edward H. Kennedy

Articles

The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to …

Life And Death In Kentucky: Past, Present, And Future, Roberta M. Harding

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article provides a historical survey of capital punishment in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, paying particular attention to gender and race. The author concludes that given the lack of recent executions that it is perhaps time to make legislative changes to the Commonwealth’s death penalty practice.