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Full-Text Articles in Criminal Procedure
The Death Penalty And The Fifth Amendment, Joseph Blocher
The Death Penalty And The Fifth Amendment, Joseph Blocher
Northwestern University Law Review
Can the Supreme Court find unconstitutional something that the text of the Constitution “contemplates”? If the Bill of Rights mentions a punishment, does that make it a “permissible legislative choice” immune to independent constitutional challenges?
Recent developments have given new hope to those seeking constitutional abolition of the death penalty. But some supporters of the death penalty continue to argue, as they have since Furman v. Georgia, that the death penalty must be constitutional because the Fifth Amendment explicitly contemplates it. The appeal of this argument is obvious, but its strength is largely superficial, and is also mostly irrelevant to …
The Eighth Amendment’S Lost Jurors: Death Qualification And Evolving Standards Of Decency, Aliza Plener Cover
The Eighth Amendment’S Lost Jurors: Death Qualification And Evolving Standards Of Decency, Aliza Plener Cover
Indiana Law Journal
The Supreme Court’s inquiry into the constitutionality of the death penalty has over-looked a critical “objective indicator” of society’s “evolving standards of decency”: the rate at which citizens are excluded from capital jury service under Witherspoon v. Illinois due to their conscientious objections to the death penalty. While the Supreme Court considers the prevalence of death verdicts as a gauge of the nation’s moral climate, it has ignored how the process of death qualification shapes those verdicts. This blind spot biases the Court’s estimation of community norms and dis-torts its Eighth Amendment analysis.
This Article presents a quantitative study of …