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Arbiters Of Decency: A Study Of Legislators' Eighth Amendment Role, Aliza Plener Cover

Articles

Within Eighth Amendment doctrine, legislators are arbiters of contemporary values. The United States Supreme Court looks closely to state and federal death penalty legislation to determine whether a given punishment is out of keeping with “evolving standards of decency.” Those who draft, debate, and vote on death penalty laws thus participate in both ordinary and higher lawmaking. This Article investigates this dual role.

We coded and aggregated information about every floor statement made in the legislative debates preceding the recent passage of bills abolishing the death penalty in Connecticut, Illinois, and Nebraska. We categorized all statements according to their position …

The Abolitionist Movement Comes Of Age: From Capital Punishment As A Lawful Sanction To A Peremptory, International Law Norm Barring Executions, John D. Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

The anti-death penalty movement is rooted in the Enlightenment, dating back to the publication of the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria’s treatise, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764). That book, later translated into English as An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1767), has inspired anti-death penalty advocacy for more than 250 years. This Article traces the development of the abolitionist movement since Beccaria’s time. In particular, it highlights how the debate over capital punishment has shifted from one focused primarily on the severity of monarchical punishments, to deterrence, to one framed by the concept of universal human rights, including the right …

The Republican Party, Conservatives, And The Future Of Capital Punishment, Ben Jones

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The United States has experienced a significant decline in the death penalty during the first part of the twenty-first century, as death sentences, executions, public support, and states with capital punishment all have declined. Many recent reforms banning or placing a moratorium on executions have occurred in blue states, in line with the notion that ending the death penalty is a progressive cause. Challenging this narrative, however, is the emergence of Republican lawmakers as champions of death penalty repeal legislation in red states. This Article puts these efforts by Republican lawmakers into historical context and explains the conservative case against …

Convictions Of Innocent People With Intellectual Disability, Sheri Johnson, John H. Blume, Amelia Courtney Hritz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court held that executing individuals with intellectual disability violates the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment. In addition to concerns over culpability and deterrence, the Court’s judgment in Atkins was informed by the heightened “risk of wrongful execution” faced by persons with intellectual disability. This essay explores that question both anecdotally and quantitatively, hoping to illuminate the causes of wrongful conviction of persons with intellectual disability. We provide examples from our experiences in the Cornell Death Penalty Clinic and cases brought to our attention by defense attorneys. We also present data …

Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber

Publications

McCleskey v. Kemp, the case that upheld the death penalty despite undeniable evidence of its racially disparate impact, is indelibly marked by Justice William Brennan’s phrase, “a fear of too much justice.” The popular interpretation of this phrase is that the Supreme Court harbored what I call a “disparity-claim fear,” dreading a future docket of racial discrimination claims and erecting an impossibly high bar for proving an equal protection violation. A related interpretation is that the majority had a “color-consciousness fear” of remedying discrimination through race-remedial policies. In contrast to these conventional views, I argue that the primary anxiety …

Public Support For The Death Penalty In A Red State: The Distrustful, The Angry, And The Unsure, Lisa Kort-Butler, Colleen M. Ray

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s 2015 legislative repeal of the death penalty and the 2016 electoral reinstatement, we examined public support for capital punishment. Using two years of statewide survey data, we compared respondents who preferred the death penalty for murder, those who preferred other penalties, and those who were unsure, a respondent group often excluded from research. To understand what distinguishes among these groups, we examined media consumption, instrumental and expressive feelings about crime, and confidence and trust in the government regarding criminal justice. Results revealed that those who preferred the death penalty expressed more anger about crime …

Police, Race, And The Production Of Capital Homicides, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Racial disparities in capital punishment have been well documented for decades. Over 50 studies have shown that Black defendants more likely than their white counterparts to be charged with capital-eligible crimes, to be convicted and sentenced to death. Racial disparities in charging and sentencing in capital-eligible homicides are the largest for the small number of cases where black defendants murder white victims compared to within-race killings, or where whites murder black or other ethnic minority victims. These patterns are robust to rich controls for non-racial characteristics and state sentencing guidelines. This article backs up the research on racial disparities to …

Parsing Personal Predilections: A Fresh Look At The Supreme Court's Cruel And Unusual Death Penalty Jurisprudence, Susan M. Raeker-Jordan

Maine Law Review

The now well-known case of Atkins v. Virginia decided that the execution of those with mental retardation constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The more recent case of Roper v. Simmons decided that execution of those who were under the age of eighteen when they committed their crimes also constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Both decisions changed the law that had existed since 1989, when the Court held in Penry v. Lynaugh and Stanford v. Kentucky that executions of members of both classes were not unconstitutional. Writing for the Court in Atkins v. Virginia, Justice Stevens was …

Age, Period, And Cohort Effects On Death Penalty Attitudes In The United States, 1974–2014, Amy L. Anderson, Robert Lytle, Philip Schwadel

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In this article, we further the understanding of both changes in public opinion on capital punishment in the United States and changes in the factors associated with public opinion on the death penalty. Support for the death penalty may be motivated by events happening during specific time periods, and it can vary across birth cohorts as a result of cohort-specific socialization processes, demographic changes, and formative events that are specific to each generation. An explication of the sources of and variation in death penalty attitudes over time would benefit from the accounting for the age of the respondent, the year …

How Would You Like To Die? Glossip V. Gross Deals Blow To Abolitionists, Brenda I. Rowe

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications (Archived)

After capital punishment opponents’ pressure on drug suppliers reduced the lethal injection drug supply, Oklahoma began using midazolam, resulting in botched executions. Condemned inmates sought to stop use of this lethal injection protocol. In Glossip v. Gross, the U.S. Supreme Court found inmates failed to establish such protocols entail a substantial risk of severe pain compared to available alternatives, undermining the supply side attack strategy and leaving inmates facing the possibility of an unnecessarily painful execution. This article places the Glossip decision within the context of method of execution jurisprudence and discusses implications for the ongoing battle over capital …

The Death Penalty's Darkside: A Response To Phyllis Goldfarb's Matters Of Strata: Race, Gender, And Class Structures In Capital Cases, Kevin Barry, Bharat Malkani

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

In Matters of Strata: Race, Gender, and Class Structures in Capital Cases, Professor Phyllis Goldfarb examines the ways in which race, class, and gender affect the American criminal justice system generally, and its death penalty system in particular. This Response focuses on one of Goldfarb’s observations: The relationship between slavery and the death penalty. This relationship helps to explain why, over the past four decades, the thirteen states that comprised the former Confederacy have been responsible for nearly all of this nation’s executions. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly failed to address the death penalty’s roots in slavery, …

Why It’S Not Ok For Doctors To Participate In Executions, Robert F. Johnson

Peer Reviewed Articles

A plea for direct physician participation in executions was presented by Sandeep Jauhar in a New York Times Op-Ed (“Why It’s OK for Doctors to Participate in Executions”—April 21, 2017). Jauhar’s article is not a discussion of the ethics of capital punishment. He describes his own opposition “as a matter of principle, as a doctor.” However, since capital punishment is legal in 31 states, with required physician participation in several, he acquiesces to a utilitarian stance rather than the principled approach he acknowledges is expected of a physician in this circumstance.

The Death Penalty And Justice Scalia's Lines, J. Richard Broughton

Akron Law Review

In Justice Scalia’s lone dissenting opinion in Morrison v. Olson, he lamented that, after the Court had upheld a law that he believed violated the separation of powers, “there are now no lines.” Lines were of critical importance to Justice Scalia – in law and in life – and informed much of his work on criminal law issues (Morrison, after all, was a case about the nature of federal prosecutorial authority). In the area of capital punishment, in particular, Justice Scalia saw clear lines that the Court should not cross. He believed that the Constitution contemplates the …

Adverse Childhood Experiences And Their Role As Mitigators For Youthful And Non-Youthful Offenders In Capital Sentencing Cases, Jessica R. Trapassi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and their role as mitigators in capital sentencing is an important, yet relatively unexplored, topic in criminological literature. Using data from the North Carolina Capital Sentencing Project, this study explores the role of ACEs as mitigating factors for youthful and non-youthful capital offenders: whether youthful offenders are less likely to be sentenced to death, whether or not ACEs are effective as mitigating factors, and whether ACE mitigators are more effective for youthful or non-youthful offenders. Results show that youthful capital offenders are less likely to be sentenced to death than adult capital offenders, and while ACE …

The Pre-Furman Juvenile Death Penalty In South Carolina: Young Black Life Was Cheap, Sheri Lynn Johnson, John H. Blume, Hannah L. Freedman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Capital punishment in this country, and in South Carolina, has its roots in racial subjugation, stereotype, and animosity. The extreme disparities we report here have dampened due to the combined effects of decreasing levels of open racial antagonism, the reforms of the modem death penalty, including categorical exemptions for juveniles and person with intellectual disabilities and prohibition of the imposition of the death penalty for the crime of rape, and the (small) increase in diversity in capital juries. But dampened does not mean eradicated. Significant disparities in the administration of capital punishment persist today. The color of a defendant's skin …

An Empirical Assessment Of Georgia's Beyond A Reasonable Doubt Standard To Determine Intellectual Disability In Capital Cases, Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court held that execution of people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In doing so, the Court explicitly left to the states the question of which procedures would be used to identify such defendants as exempt from the death penalty. More than a decade before Atkins, Georgia was the first state to bar execution of people with intellectual disability. Yet, of the states that continue to impose the death penalty as a punishment for capital murder, Georgia is the only state that requires capital defendants to prove …

If It Walks Like Systematic Exclusion And Quacks Like Systematic Exclusion: Follow-Up On Removal Of Women And African-Americans In Jury Selection In South Carolina Capital Cases, 1997-2014, Ann M. Eisenberg, Amelia Courtney Hritz, Caisa Elizabeth Royer, John H. Blume

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article builds on an earlier study analyzing bases and rates of removal of women and African-American jurors in a set of South Carolina capital cases decided between 1997 and 2012. We examine and assess additional data from new perspectives in order to establish a more robust, statistically strengthened response to the original research question: whether, and if so, why, prospective women and African-American jurors were disproportionately removed in different stages of jury selection in a set of South Carolina capital cases.

The study and the article it builds on add to decades of empirical research exploring the impacts (or …

The Death Penalty And Just Peacemaking, Justin Randall Phillips

Leaven

No abstract provided.

The Inequality Of America‘S Death Penalty: A Crossroads For Capital Punishment At The Intersection Of The Eighth And Fourteenth Amendments, John D. Bessler

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

The Law Of Abolition, Kevin M. Barry

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Three themes have characterized death penalty abolition throughout the Western world: a sustained period of de facto abolition; an understanding of those in government that the death penalty implicates human rights; and a willingness of those in government to defy popular support for the death penalty. The first two themes are present in the U.S.; what remains is for the U.S. Supreme Court to manifest a willingness to act against the weight of public opinion and to live up to history’s demands.

When the Supreme Court abolishes the death penalty, it will be traveling a well-worn road. This Essay gathers, …

The American Death Penalty Decline, Brandon L. Garrett, Alexander Jakubow, Ankur Desai

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

American death sentences have both declined and become concentrated in a small group of counties. In his dissenting opinion in Glossip v. Gross in 2014, Justice Stephen Breyer highlighted how from 2004 to 2006, “just 29 counties (fewer than 1% of counties in the country) accounted for approximately half of all death sentences imposed nationwide.” That decline has become more dramatic. In 2015, fifty-one defendants were sentenced to death in thirty-eight counties. In 2016, thirty-one defendants were sentenced to death in twenty-eight counties. In the mid-1990s, by way of contrast, over 300 people were sentenced to death in as many …

A Culture That Is Hard To Defend: Extralegal Factors In Federal Death Penalty Cases, Jon B. Gould, Kenneth S. Leon

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Empirical research has exposed a troubling pattern of capital punishment in the United States, with extralegal factors such as race, class, and gender strongly correlated with the probability of a death sentence. Capital sentencing also shows significant geographic disparities, although existing research tends to be more descriptive than explanatory. This study offers an alternative conception of local legal culture to explain place-based variation in the outcomes of federal capital trials, accounting for the level of attorney time and expert resources granted by the federal courts to defend against a death sentence. Using frequentist and Bayesian methods—supplemented with expert interviews—we empirically …

Examining Jurors: Applying Conversation Analysis To Voir Dire In Capital Cases, A First Look, Barbara O'Brien, Catherine M. Grosso, Abijah P. Taylor

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Scholarship about racial disparities in jury selection is extensive, but the data about how parties examine potential jurors in actual trials is limited. This study of jury selection for 792 potential jurors across twelve randomly selected North Carolina capital cases uses conversation analysis to examine the process that produces decisions about who serves on juries. To examine how race influences conversations in voir dire, we adapted the Roter Interaction Analysis System, a widely used framework for understanding the dynamics of patient–clinician communication during clinical encounters, to the legal setting for the first time. This method allows us to document the …

Race And Death Sentencing For Oklahoma Homicides Committed Between 1990 And 2012, Glenn L. Pierce, Michael L. Radelet, Susan Sharp

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This Article examines 4,668 Oklahoma homicide cases with an identified suspect that occurred during a twenty-three year period between January 1, 1990, and December 31, 2012. Among these, we identified 153 cases that ended with a death sentence. Overall we found that while the defendant’s race did not correlate with a death sentence, there was a strong correlation with the race of the victim, with cases with white victims significantly more likely to end with a death sentence than cases with non-white victims. Homicides with female victims were also more likely to result in a death sentence than other cases. …

The Rhetoric Of Abolition: Continuity And Change In The Struggle Against America's Death Penalty, 1900-2010, Austin Sarat, Robert Kermes, Haley Cambra, Adelyn Curran, Margaret Kiley, Keshav Pant

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This article seeks to understand when, how, and where the framing of arguments against capital punishment has changed. While others have focused exclusively on the national level, we studied the framing of abolitionist arguments in three American states: Connecticut, Kansas, and Texas. Each is located in a different region of the country, and each has its own distinctive death penalty history. We studied the framing of arguments against the death penalty from 1900 to 2010. Our study suggests that the rhetorical reframing of the campaign against capital punishment that has occurred at the national level has had deep resonance at …

What We Think, What We Know And What We Think We Know About False Convictions, Samuel Gross

Articles

False convictions are notoriously difficult to study because they can neither be observed when they occur nor identified after the fact by any plausible research strategy. Our best shot is to collect data on those that come to light in legal proceedings that result in the exoneration of the convicted defendants. In May 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations released its first report, covering 873 exonerations from January 1989 through February 2012. By October 15, 2016, we had added 1,027 cases: 599 exonerations since March 1, 2012, and 428 that had already happened when we issued our initial report but …

Reforming The Death Penalty In Egypt: An Islamic Law Perspective, Gaber Mohamed

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

The main goal of this thesis is to reform the imposition of the death penalty in the Egyptian legal system through the tools and theories of Islamic law. This subject will be discussed in three main chapters: The first chapter will be a survey of the current application of the death penalty in the Egyptian legal system, including the death penalty’s history, laws, courts, appeals, legal procedures, and general comments on the current application of the penalty. The second chapter will be about the death penalty in Islamic law – including the sources of Islamic law, the crimes that merit …

Criminal Deterrence: A Review Of The Literature, Aaron Chalfin, Justin Mccrary

Faculty Scholarship

We review economics research regarding the effect of police, punishments, and work on crime, with a particular focus on papers from the last twenty years. Evidence in favor of deterrence effects is mixed. While there is considerable evidence that crime is responsive to police and to the existence of attractive legitimate labor-market opportunities, there is far less evidence that crime responds to the severity of criminal sanctions. We discuss fruitful directions for future work and implications for public policy.

The Italian Enlightenment And The American Revolution: Cesare Beccaria's Forgotten Influence On American Law, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

The influence of the Italian Enlightenment—the Illuminismo—on the American Revolution has long been neglected. While historians regularly acknowledge the influence of European thinkers such as William Blackstone, John Locke and Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria’s contributions to the origins and development of American law have largely been forgotten by twenty-first century Americans. In fact, Beccaria’s book, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), translated into English as On Crimes and Punishments (1767), significantly shaped the views of American revolutionaries and lawmakers. The first four U.S. Presidents—George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—were inspired by Beccaria’s treatise and, in some cases, read …

Capital Jurors In An Era Of Death Penalty Decline, Brandon L. Garrett, Daniel Krauss, Nicholas Scurich

Faculty Scholarship

The state of public opinion regarding the death penalty has not experienced such flux since the late 1960s. Death sentences and executions have reached their lowest annual numbers since the early 1970s and today, the public appears fairly evenly split in its views on the death penalty. In this Essay, we explore, first, whether these changes in public opinion mean that fewer people will be qualified to serve on death penalty trials as jurors, and second, whether potential jurors are affected by changes in the practice of the death penalty. We conducted surveys of persons reporting for jury duty at …