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Virginia's Capital Jurors, Stephen P. Garvey, Paul Marcus
Virginia's Capital Jurors, Stephen P. Garvey, Paul Marcus
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Next to Texas, no state has executed more capital defendants than Virginia. Moreover, the likelihood of a death sentence actually being carried out is greater in Virginia than it is elsewhere, while the length of time between the imposition of a death sentence and its actual execution is shorter. Virginia has thus earned a reputation among members of the defense bar as being among the worst of the death penalty states. Yet insofar as these facts about Virginia's death penalty relate primarily to the behavior of state and federal appellate courts, they suggest that what makes Virginia's death penalty unique …
Judicial Politics, Death Penalty Appeals, And Case Selection: An Empirical Study, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg
Judicial Politics, Death Penalty Appeals, And Case Selection: An Empirical Study, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Several studies try to explain case outcomes based on the politics of judicial selection methods. Scholars usually hypothesize that judges selected by partisan popular elections are subject to greater political pressure in deciding cases than are other judges. No class of cases seems more amenable to such analysis than death penalty cases. No study, however, accounts both for judicial politics and case selection, the process through which cases are selected for death penalty litigation. Yet, the case selection process cannot be ignored because it yields a set of cases for adjudication that is far from a random selection of cases. …