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SelectedWorks

William W Berry III

Capital Punishment

Publication Year

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Full-Text Articles in Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law

Repudiating Death, William W. Berry Iii Jan 2011

Repudiating Death, William W. Berry Iii

William W Berry III

In recent years, three Supreme Court justices, Powell, Blackmun, and Stevens, have all called for the abolition of the death penalty, repudiating their prior approval of the use of capital punishment. This article conceptualizes these reversals not as normative shifts on the morality of capital punishment, but instead as shifts in the justices' views concerning their own need to exercise judicial restraint towards the states with respect to the death penalty. Two separate decisions comprise their abandonment of judicial restraint. First, Powell, Blackmun, and Stevens all acquiesce to the decision of the Court to use the Eighth Amendment to regulate …


Ending Death By Dangerousness, William W. Berry Iii Jan 2010

Ending Death By Dangerousness, William W. Berry Iii

William W Berry III

The use of the death penalty (both in number of new death sentences and actual executions) has been steadily decreasing in the past decade. This decrease has largely been attributed to two phenomena: (1) the continued discovery of individuals on death row who are actually innocent of the crimes they committed and (2) the increasing use of life without parole as a sentencing alternative to the death penalty. Abolitionists have successfully seized upon the first of these in raising continuing doubts about the use of the death penalty. This article proposes a deeper exploration of the second, the availability of …